Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps: How to Thrive in Complexity 9781503609785

Citation preview

UNLOCKING

LEADERSHIP

MINDTRAPS

This page intentionally left blank

U N L O C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S How to Thrive in Complexity

J EN N I F ER

GA RV EY

BE RG E R

stanford briefs An Imprint of Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Garvey Berger, Jennifer, 1970– author. Title: Unlocking leadership mindtraps : how to thrive in complexity / Jennifer Garvey Berger. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford Briefs, an imprint of Stanford University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical ­references. Identifiers: LCCN 2018050366 (print) | LCCN 2018058781 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503609785 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503609013 (pbk.; alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Leadership—Psychological aspects. | Complexity (Philosophy) Classification: LCC HD57.7 (ebook) | LCC HD57.7 .B46975 2019 (print) | DDC 658./092019—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018050366 Cover design: Kevin Barrett Kane Cover illustration: Marina Zlochin Typeset by Classic Typography in 11/15 Adobe Garamond

F O R N AO M I C AT H E R I N E A N D A I DA N J A M E S , I N G R AT I T U D E F O R A L L I H AV E L E A R N E D F RO M YO U A N D W I T H H O P E T H AT T H E S E I D E A S W I L L MAKE YOUR LIVES, AND THE WORLD YOU ARE INHERITING, BETTER FOR YOU AND BETTER F O R T H O S E W H O C O M E A F T E R Y O U. I LO V E Y O U M O R E T H A N T H E M O O N A N D T H E S TA R S.

This page intentionally left blank

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments    ix      Introduction   1 1   The

Five Quirks and How They Become Traps   4

2   Trapped

by Simple Stories: Your Desire for a Simple Story Blinds You to a Real One   21

3   Trapped

by Rightness: Just Because It Feels Right Doesn’t Mean It Is Right   40

4   Trapped

by Agreement: Longing for Alignment Robs You of Good Ideas   58

5   Trapped

by Control: Trying to Take Charge Strips You of Influence   74

6   Trapped

by Ego: Shackled to Who You Are Now, You Can’t Reach for Who You’ll Be Next   92

7   Building

a Ladder to Escape the Mindtraps   112

Notes    137 Selected Bibliography    143 About the Author    147

This page intentionally left blank

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In my two previous books, I have thanked the writers and thinkers whose work has so profoundly informed mine. Know that I feel grateful to you still, every day. As I write these acknowledgments from my new flat in London, I am deeply aware that the quality and texture of my relationships is fundamental to my writing and thinking. Bob Kegan and Bill Torbert, Bob Anderson and David Rooke, I treasure the time we have spent together and all I have learned from you and alongside you, not just from your theories but from your friendship. A special thank-you to my dear friend Doug Silsbee, who died before he read this manuscript; your ideas and your spirit weave through me and this book and will be with me for the rest of my life. My colleagues at Cultivating Leadership, the firm we began two books ago, have been a constant source of support and inspiration for me. These ideas have grown as the organization has grown, and the voices, ideas, and feedback of these treasured friends and colleagues have

x

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

become part of who I am. Thank you to Anne Nagle, Carolyn Coughlin, Jim Wicks, Keith Johnston, Patrice Laslett, Wendy Bittner, and Zafer Achi, who lead the firm with me and shape the edges of our thinking about leading in complexity and the mindtraps we try to escape together. Blessings to Diana Manks, Joy Guilleux, and Rebecca Scott, the catalyst team that makes my life better every day; I’m not sure how you put up with me, but geez, I hope it keeps up. Thanks to Sue O’Dea and Tanya James, who encouraged me to expand the at-home section of the case study, and to Carolyn Coughlin for her companionship in ways of the mind and the heart. My gratitude to Kathrin O’Sullivan, who read an early draft and wrote comments that made my heart sing on days when my internal critic was drowning out the writing. Parker Mitchell is a colleague at CL and also a CEO of his own cool start-up; his questions about increasing impact 10× are sometimes exasperating and always incredibly useful.* I am particularly grateful to Wendy Bittner, who has read this book many times with a fierce passion and a fine eye and who, with Mindy Danna, Keith Johnston, and the rest of the client service team, has created a leadership program based on this book before I was even sure the ideas would make it into the world. My collaboration with Keith Johnston has changed me forever, and *If

you’d like to try out Parker’s cool tools to help you hold on to the lessons in this book, use this link: www.choose shift.com/mindtraps

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xi

even though he did not coauthor this book, I hope that something of his rigor and his humor has made it onto these pages. Zafer Achi kept me on my toes, reading every page as fast as I could write it and encouraging me always to think bigger, connect the ideas more smoothly, push harder into one literature or another. His wise counsel made the ideas better, but it was his optimism that these ideas could change the world that was most precious. My clients are always my inspiration and in this book perhaps more than any other. Thank you for the constant support to make the ideas faster, more applicable, more helpful in the world. Particular thanks to Alison Parrin, Ciela Hartanov, Brian Glaser, and Karen May and all of the folks at the Google School for Leaders who read the manuscript in an earlier draft and offered ideas and inspiration. I am grateful to Stuart Irvine and Bob Barbour and the whole Lion team; Melissa McLaughlin and David Shenkein at Agios Pharmaceuticals; and Kirsten Dunlop at Climate KIC. All of you have inspired me with your leadership, which pushed to make these ideas come to life. Mike Vierow and John Lydon of McKinsey took a chance on these new ideas as we designed a mindtrapsbased program for high-potential leaders across Australia and New Zealand. My coaching clients, hidden in the many case studies which follow, will remain anonymous here, but your struggles and triumphs have taught me more about leadership than any theory or book ever could. This book is from you and also for you.

xii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you too for those other friends who have read this manuscript in draft. This is the first book I’ve sent out to people in a Google Doc, and it was really fun to watch you all play with the language and interact with each other as you tried on new titles, new ideas, new phrasings. Thanks to Maurice Alford, Kerrie Ashcroft, Desley Lodwick, David Metherell, Cornelis Tanis, and Marco Valente. Margo Beth Fleming began two books ago as my editor and I’m honored to now have her as a friend. Thanks for your guidance and your support on this one, even though you’re off in another life yourself now. Steve Catalano, my new editor at Stanford, has been unfailing in his encouragement and delight in this project, which he loves almost as much as he loves sea kayaking. Thanks too to Jeff Wyneken who has copyedited these words with care, and to Sunna Juhn who makes sure none of the details are lost in the great sweep toward publication. And, in an unusual time, here is an unusual thankyou. I want to thank the team who has cared for my body as my ideas have found their way to the page. I sketched the idea for this book in my journal two nights before I was diagnosed with a local recurrence of the breast cancer I had had two years before. This book was written as I prepped for and recovered from four surgeries, and in the radiotherapy waiting room. Stan Govender, my surgeon, dazzled me with his combination of competence and kindness, although neither of us was particularly pleased at how many times we got to see each other in the oper-

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xiii

ating theater. Mark Renneker and Keith Block have been my integrated oncology team, delving into the mysteries of cancer (why did it come back?) and helping me with the diet and life style that are intended to keep it away for good. They have offered me guidance and, more important, hope. The staff of the Wellington Hospital Blood and Cancer Centre and the Radiotherapy Department worked to heal my body and my spirit. Amazing what a cheerful “Good morning, Love!” can do to make a gray time feel a little brighter. Debbie Ingham, my GP, coordinated all of this with warmth and boundless energy. My dear friend Melissa Garber met me for almost every one of my radiotherapy appointments, making me smile when she could and just being there for me when I was too afraid to smile. How glorious to have a best friend finishing her PhD in clinical psychology when I needed it most! And, generally, my experience with the public health system in New Zealand felt miraculous to me. I am grateful to my adopted country and its doctors for their care and support. Jim Garvey read these words and offered his fine touch as a writer, and his loving touch as a dad. Jamie Council Garvey and Tamara Eberlein-Garvey were the inspiration for the book in the first place. I figured if I hadn’t yet written a book that you two brilliant women loved, I needed to remedy that (now I hope I have!). Catherine Fitzgerald was my introduction to these fields, and I feel unspeakably lucky to have a colleague, mentor, and mother all in a single person.

xiv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Michael Garvey Berger belongs on most of the lists above but is in a place of his own as a colleague at Cultivating Leadership, a companion by my side at hospitals and in our living room, and a constant reader of seriously rough drafts when he probably wanted to be doing something else. If we had peered into this future on our first date thirty years ago, we would never have believed where life would take us. Thanks for traveling through complexity with me and showing me how growth and love can build both of us ladders to a new future. Finally, for my children, Naomi and Aidan, to whom this book is dedicated. You were crawling and scribbling when I wrote my doctoral dissertation, learning to read as I wrote Changing on the Job, and starting high school as I cowrote Simple Habits. This book will come out as you’re both at university. My books have grown as you have grown—my laptop on our dining room table a familiar companion. This is the first book you have read in drafts, the first book you have talked about with your friends, the first book that you tell me makes your lives a little better. There is nothing in my life I’m prouder of than you two. This book is for you.

UNLOCKING

LEADERSHIP

MINDTRAPS

This page intentionally left blank

INTRODUCTION

This book was born at a party in Seattle, when two smart women told me that my first two books had mostly taught them that complexity was too hard for them to understand. Epic fail on my part. Over the next months, I had dozens of leaders, breathless with overwhelm, ask me if I could synthesize everything I had learned about thriving in this increasingly complex world into something fast and pithy and easily consumed. The challenge was set. I reread my notes from thousands of hours of individual and group meetings in organizations. I pulled out every book and journal article I have read for the last decade, and I ruthlessly began to prune down to the most helpful ideas and practices I could find. I was surprised and delighted when they all began to take form as the five mindtraps which are the focus of this book. I found that our mistakes in complexity, while various (and variously 1

2

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

debilitating), coalesce in these five ways that our biology conspires to mislead us. The Stanford Brief you hold in your hands is meant for you, no matter what kind of leader you might be. It doesn’t matter whether your leadership position is entry or executive, if it’s formally recognized or whether you’re just leading your life. If your life is feeling more complex, less predictable, and more confusing than it used to, and if you’re finding that your reflexes are sometimes leading you astray, this book is meant to help you understand why—and how to make changes that will make your life easier, that will make the increasing complexity your friend rather than your enemy. I learned after Keith and I wrote Simple Habits that the single case study that weaves through the text is the cilantro of business book ingredients.1 Some readers love the story and say it helps the ideas land; others hate it and prefer smaller examples to bring the ideas to life. In this text I offer both, so feel free to go with whichever ingredients are the most useful for your learning. If you’re one of the readers who needs to hear the main message of a book  in order to decide  whether it’s for them, here goes. In all of my research, writing, teaching, and learning over the last three decades, I have found that we humans are brilliantly designed—for an older, less connected, and more predictable version of the world.  In today’s highly interconnected, fast-changing world, we need to take some of that brilliant design and purposefully reshape it to be fit for the unpredict-

INTRODUCTION

3

able future that is unfolding. When we do this, we find that not only does the complex world of today seem less overwhelming, but we also solve problems more effectively, our relationships improve, and we even like ourselves better. Come see how.

1  THE FIVE QUIRKS AND HOW THEY BECOME TRAPS

“Holy schmoly, it was a disaster!” Mark said, burying his face in his hands. “All those eyes were staring at me, waiting for the wisdom of the leader, and I totally choked. I can’t show my face out there again for at least a couple of weeks. We’ll have to come up with an excellent excuse for my absence. Maybe you could say I was called away to some impressive humanitarian aid effort? I could be wounded there and come back a hero! Then no one would remember what a screw-up I am.” “He asked you a tough question for sure,” Leroy said, looking for a place to sit down in Mark’s office amid the piles of papers and books on every surface. He gave up and leaned against the wall. “But I’m not sure your answer was quite bad enough to run away and join the circus.” Mark glanced up, with his more familiar half grin. “Circus—good thinking, my friend!” but then his face fell. “In the old days, there was no question I couldn’t answer! I was on top of every problem my team worked on. I knew 4

THE FIVE QUIRKS AND HOW THEY BECOME TRAPS

5

every line of code and I obviously knew everyone’s name. I knew what had happened to each of them last week, and I had about a ninety-five percent accurate forecast about what was going to happen to them next week. Those were the glory days! Now it all moves so fast and we are so matrixed that I can hardly keep track of the reporting lines on the org chart—much less the names and work of each of the ­people. And questions like the one Rob asked today—” “It was Simon who asked that question,” Leroy interrupted. “Rob left six weeks ago to start up his own company.” “Damn!” Mark gave a little howl of distress. “Simon then. I don’t actually understand what his whole unit does. I have no idea why they report to me. There’s no way I can add value to his work or help him solve a problem. I’m the worst leader ever!” “You think you’re such a bad leader because you can’t help him solve a technical problem?” Leroy asked doubtfully. “Oh, don’t give me that HR voice, Leroy. I know you don’t think I should be working with my people on technical stuff, but honestly it’s the best way for me to help out. And then I get a team like this and can’t help them at all!” “I know you love old-school technical leadership, Mark. And I know you love using your expertise to solve really tricky problems, but I just don’t think leadership requires that these days. In fact, I’ve been playing with some ideas about how leaders need to be different these days. They’re counterintuitive but helpful. After this morning, maybe you’d be interested?”

6

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

“You’re kidding, Leroy! Have you met me? Have you been to my house? I can’t even do intuitive leadership well— counterintuitive is way beyond my pay grade. Unless your counterintuitive ideas are about How to Time Travel So You Can Get All Your Shit Done, I’m out. I have to work twice as hard to stay on top of all this stuff as I used to— as you can see in my disastrous performance today.” Leroy laughed. “Man, you are really beating yourself up for this. And this is exactly what I mean. There are ways that our internal wiring tells us to do one thing, when the smart leadership move is to do something totally opposite. Like your desire to master more and more details rather than get out of the detail game altogether.” “I know these new theories are super interesting to you, my friend, but you’re an HR geek. I’m just a computer programmer who suddenly found himself running a team too big for his brain to handle. I’m barely surviving here. I hardly have time to pick up lunch to scarf down in a meeting. Does this knowledge come in a liquid form?” Mark asked, rifling through a stack of papers on the chair next to him. “Or better, in a pill? I don’t really have time to drink. And anyway,” he said with a groan as he remembered the meeting he had just come out of, “I have that humanitarian aid crisis to deal with, so you won’t see me around here for a while.”

Mark might remind you of yourself, or someone you work with. Leaders today are busier than they’ve ever been, and they are falling behind. It’s not only that the demands on them are so much more time consuming

THE FIVE QUIRKS AND HOW THEY BECOME TRAPS

7

than they used to be (although that seems to be true). It’s that the nature of the challenges has changed in such a way that the tools and approaches of the past simply don’t work. In the past ten years, I have worked with thousands of leaders around the world on how to lead in complex, uncertain environments. I’ve become fascinated by what gets in our way, and particularly fascinated by one particular phenomenon: those times when our reflexes are exactly wrong. Such times seem to clump together in particular ways and create a perverse and seemingly inescapable trap: our human instincts, shaped for (and craving) a simple world, fundamentally mislead us in a complex, unpredictable world. It’s like having an old operating system for your computer that opened files when you tried to close them and deleted things when you tried to save them. The operating system of our minds has a quirk when we are working in complexity, and that quirk sets us on a course of action that is the exact opposite of what the situation really needs. You see, our experience isn’t always the helpful compass it once was. In the past, when things were changing more slowly and we were less interconnected, we could rely on our experience to tell us what would probably happen next. If you were an accountant in your town in the 1950s, you’d know that there were a certain number of changes you could expect—shifts in your client list, fiddles with the tax code, the way the economy of your town was

8

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

reliant on the price of corn or cars or whatever people produced around you. You would know that no matter what happened, people would require your work, even if the particulars varied from year to year. You’d recognize the patterns from what you already knew, and you’d be able to see a narrow set of fairly predictable future possibilities; you’d have a pretty good guess what five years from now would look like. Today there are so many things we deal with on a daily basis that are unpredictable, and there’s no way of telling how these unpredictable pieces will interact. It’s the interactions of all these unpredictable things that create complexity. The more interconnected we are, and the faster things are changing, the more complex our world is. This shifts formerly straightforward professions into confusing complex ones. Accountants today wonder whether their entire profession is going away, whether they will be 90 percent replaced by computers (and when?), and what business they should bet on next to keep their firms alive. They have no idea what five years from now looks like. Their old leadership tools—to help them control, predict, plan—fail them. And worse, their ways of thinking and feeling about the issues at hand fail them too. Frustratingly, the fact that our reflexes lead us astray in complex and uncertain times doesn’t seem to make us less likely to use them. The cognitive and emotional shortcuts honed over the course of tens of thousands of years of evolution are so automatic that we use them without even noticing whether they’re helpful or not.

THE FIVE QUIRKS AND HOW THEY BECOME TRAPS

9

Part cognitive bias, part neurological quirk, part adaptive response to a simple world that doesn’t exist anymore, they are “mindtraps.” Perhaps the trickiest thing about these mindtraps is the way they combine to mislead us about the fact that we’re in traps at all. Unwittingly stuck in a trap, we tend to believe we should simply try harder rather than try something else. We need help to find the traps and then escape from them. In my research into leadership and complexity, I’ve found five of the most pernicious and pervasive of these mindtraps. They answer the question I am often asked: What is the most important shift I need to make if I am going to lead well in complexity? In this book, we will identify the mindtraps, look at the ways they’ve served us so far, and consider why they don’t work so well anymore. We’ll also learn some powerful keys to unlock the traps and escape to new possibilities. You’ll see that • We are trapped by simple stories. • We are trapped by rightness. • We are trapped by agreement. • We are trapped by control. • We are trapped by our ego. Understanding new ways to notice and escape these mindtraps turns out to be a kind of super power that allows you to see new opportunities, create new solutions, and move forward with more finesse and less angst. And

10

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

these ideas will help you at work or at home—anywhere your life has gotten more complex. Which, if you’re like Mark, is probably everywhere. “Hey, sweetie, how’s your day going?” Mark straightened his headset and smiled at his wife’s voice. “Hi, Ali. Insane. Unbearable. Regular. I was actually thinking of running away to join the circus.” “Sounds excellent,” she said, distractedly. He heard her take a bite of something. “Hey, I know it’s my turn to deal with dinner tonight,” Alison said with her mouth full, “but I just got a call from the nanny and she says Naomi has some extra rehearsal tonight and she can’t stay, so I have to swing by and get her from dance class. Which means you have to get dinner started first or else the kids will be cranky and unmanageable.” “Extra rehearsal? She’s seven. This is not the Nutcracker at Lincoln Center. This is little kids in peapod costumes spinning around until they fall over.” Alison laughed. “We are aligned, my friend. But I have to get back to the board meeting in two minutes and then I have to race out to pick up our peapod and her little sprout of a brother. And then, I need to get home to a hot meal— handled by you—on the table at 7:13. Deal?” Mark, not understanding the myriad complex forces that just went into play for him to be handed dinner duty, just sighed gently. “Never fear. I’ll have DoorDash at the ready.”

It’s not just that we are facing more complexity at work. There is more complexity in our lives outside work too. A

THE FIVE QUIRKS AND HOW THEY BECOME TRAPS

11

hundred years ago, most leaders went to work knowing their wives were at home taking care of things, and the divide between work and home was significant. Now leaders are pumping breast milk on their lunch breaks and singing their kids to sleep before a video conference with team members on the other side of the world. That trend toward an unprecedented intersection of change, uncertainty, and ambiguity shows up at home too. There are more choices to make about how we live our lives, and thus fewer ready-made paths to follow. More of us spend more of our time making things up than ever before. This means that we need support coping with the mounting complexity at home as well as work. The bad news is that these mindtraps catch us at home too. The good news is that the ideas about how to escape them hold steady at home or at work, and whether you’re leading a company or a family or a choir. Alison clicked her phone off and slipped it back on Silent. She ran her fingers through her hair quickly, ran her tongue over her teeth to check for any sandwich that might be lodged there, and walked back into the boardroom. The (mostly) men who sat around the table half stood as she entered; she didn’t know whether they’d do that for any CEO or whether it was her gender that caused the half rise that seemed to mark her entrance. Coming from a casual startup to this position was still jarring, even after four months on the job. And now, talking to the board about the changes she wanted to make was even more nerve-racking.

12

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

“Alison, we have been talking about these reorganization plans while you had to step out,” Bill, the chair, began. “You know they’re the biggest changes ever in the life of this venerable firm. We know that we hired you in order to shake things up and, well, this will surely do that.” Alison’s palms began to sweat. She tried to give herself a quick and silent pep talk. Bill was in many ways a dream chair. He had been at Anderson, Nicholson, and Mitchell for thirty years now and had the depth of experience with the industry she obviously lacked. And yet he also absolutely saw the need for innovation—had led the company’s rebranding as the more modern-sounding AN&M and had worked to appeal to the start-ups that were taking over the business world in San Francisco. All along, he had fought against being bought by one of the big accounting firms; he knew it was time to innovate or die. A trained accountant herself, Alison was the innovator. Most of her experience was in financial tech firms—including IrRational, which she started herself. It was totally unexpected when the board asked her to not just pocket the cash when AN&M purchased IrRational, but also pocket the keys to the CEO’s office. By the time Alison arrived, the firm had shrunk down to half of its former size. It was nearly impossible to stave off competition that came in both directions—from the big accounting firms that were outsourcing to Bangladesh, and from little software packages like the one her start-up had created. With these desperate times in mind, Bill continued. “So you have our somewhat apprehensive approval. But you’ll

THE FIVE QUIRKS AND HOW THEY BECOME TRAPS

13

have to be very certain of the success of these changes— we’re betting the whole farm here.” “That makes sense, Bill,” Alison said, rubbing her sweaty palms on her skirt. “And believe me, I wouldn’t make this move unless I was sure it was the only way to go.”

Like many of us, Alison is called on to do things she’d never imagined—in her case, blending start-up and professional services cultures to create a brand-new kind of firm. But we are making these moves into totally new terrain with yesterday’s equipment. As the science and research improves, we learn more about ourselves and what humans do really well—and what we don’t. There’s this funny paradox, though, because much of what our sophisticated science—augmented by computers and machines that peer into our bodies and brains—tells us is about what we cannot change about ourselves, what we just get with the package of being human. “What’s the point of that?” you might be thinking. “How could knowing that we cannot control something be a help to us? Doesn’t that mean we should just give up?” Okay, admittedly, when I first started learning about the ways our biases and reflexes and irrationalities were unfixable, I wanted to go take a nap. After all, I was wanting to polish us all up, make us shiny and new and ready to face all the complexities life has to offer, and what I discovered is that we’re just not built that way. The complexity of the world requires that we understand the grays, that we resist black-and-white solutions, that we

14

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

ask different questions about unexpected and tangential options. But alas, we humans are built to simplify and segment, and it goes against all of our natural pulls to take another person’s perspective or to see a system in action. I would read cheerful books about uncovering and following your intuition, and inwardly I’d be screaming, “Noooooo! Do not follow your intuition—it is broken beyond belief!” But, of course, that was simplistic too (because, as you see, I am as irrational and biased and simple-making as the rest of the human race). Yet, as the behavioral economist Dan Ariely says, we humans know about our limitations in the physical realm, and we find ways—using machines and medicine and other supports—to overcome them. If we knew about our limitations in the way we make sense of the world and therefore act, we could figure out ways to overcome those limitations too. Behavioral economists know we need to understand what traps we might fall into as we make tricky financial decisions like saving for retirement or figuring out how much to pay for our dream house. It’s just as important to understand our leadership mindtraps and why they are not helpful to us as we lead in a complex world. So let’s take the lessons we’re learning from fields across the study of human thinking and action, and let’s see how to identify the most common mindtraps—and sidestep around them. Alison unbuckled Tate and grabbed Naomi’s ballet bag, balancing it perilously with her own laptop case and Tate’s

THE FIVE QUIRKS AND HOW THEY BECOME TRAPS

15

lunch box. “Okay, everybody out!” she called to the kids, trying to make her exhaustion sound more like good cheer. “What is that spectacular smell, Mark?” she asked as she dumped the bags on the table by the door and the kids ran inside, suddenly squealing in delight at some unexpected surprise. “You’ve found an app that delivers home-cooked smells along with packaged meals?” “Nah—even better,” Mark answered, putting down his beer and picking up the assorted lunch boxes and school bags that were about to collapse on the floor. “I ran into Leroy on the way home, and I must have looked so distressed that he waved his magic wand and became our dinner fairy tonight.” “That is perfect in so many ways! Dinner, happy kids, and free consulting too!” Alison noted, taking a swig of Mark’s beer. Leroy was not only Mark’s HR business partner extraordinaire but also their neighbor and one of their best friends. A widower for the past two years, Leroy had kids the same age as Naomi and Tate, and so it was the noise of all four kids playing that streamed up from the family room downstairs. “Leroy,” Alison called, “What did we ever do without you?” Leroy popped his head out from the kitchen. “Women everywhere have asked themselves that question,” he said, smiling. “Want to tell the kids to wash hands for dinner?” Forty-five raucous minutes later, Alison sighed in contentment as she sat with a glass of Merlot while Mark put all four kids to bed upstairs. They had decided on a weekday sleepover since the kids went to the same school, and the

16

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

grownups could get a little time alone. She wanted to ask Leroy his opinion about the challenge Bill had set for her. She trusted his depth of knowledge and experience and knew his judgment was sound. As she laid out her challenge, Leroy nodded intently and listened well, occasionally checking in to be sure he had understood. Mark joined for the last part of the conversation and sat down next to Alison, rubbing her feet as she talked about the plans she had for AN&M and the cautious support from Bill and the board. “Watch out,” Mark said, “Leroy’s hot on a fancy new set of ideas about how we’re all wrong all the time. He might try to get you to listen to him since I’ve escaped his clutches.” Leroy rolled his eyes and tossed a pillow in Mark’s general direction. “Nah, you’ve convinced me that you’re not ready for my fancy new ideas.” Leroy turned to Alison. “Perhaps there is space in our remedial listening class for Mark while you and I meet for coffee, Alison, and talk about how what I’m learning can make your life better.” Alison raised her glass, smiling. “I will drink to both of those suggestions! Let’s schedule some time together while Mark learns to listen!”

None of the mindtraps catch us when the world is predictably marching along. In fact, they’ve probably been adaptive for most of our time on the planet—that’s why they exist in the first place. Once useful shortcuts, now they turn out to be a problem when your world seems to be changing faster and becoming more interconnected

THE FIVE QUIRKS AND HOW THEY BECOME TRAPS

17

and complex than it has been in the past. See if any of these sound familiar: Trapped by simple stories. Your desire for a simple story blinds you to a real one. One of the things that defines us as humans is our propensity for stories. We love to tell them, to hear them. They carry the answers to some of our most important and bewildering questions. They have bound together tribes, religions, societies. We love them so much that we string together stories with a sort of once-upon-a-time feel, with one thing leading naturally to the next. Looking back at something, we can tell a coherent story about it that makes it sound inevitable and neat, and therein lies the rub. We don’t notice how simple the story is that we are telling ourselves, and we don’t notice the ways the story itself shapes what we notice. The problem is twofold: first, that past story wasn’t so clean or inevitable while it was happening; and second, we try to use that same skill looking forward, which in fast-changing times you can’t, because you can’t tell which of the many, many possibilities will emerge. We made the past story simple in our memory, looking back, and now we imagine an equally simple plot line going forward. In both cases we’re probably wrong. Leaders who put too much faith in their heroic tales of the past and project simplistic versions of the future can be alluring—and ruinous. To escape we need to find our way out of our simple stories and back into our complex real ones. Trapped by rightness. Just because it feels right doesn’t mean it is right. We each look at the world and believe we

18

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

see it as it is. In truth, we see it as we are, a gap that is as large as it is invisible. And because we believe in what we see, and we don’t notice those things we don’t see, we have a sense of our being right about most things most of the time. Sure, sometimes we are uncertain, and we notice that feeling, often with discomfort. It’s when we are not uncomfortably uncertain that we tend to assume we’re right. “Wrongology” expert Kathryn Shultz calls this “error blindness” and writes, “As with dying, we recognize erring as something that happens to everyone, without feeling that it is either plausible or desirable that it will happen to us.”1 When we are uncertain, we search around for understanding and we learn; when we know we’re right, we are closed to new possibilities. When leaders believe they are right in a complex world, they become dangerous, because they ignore data that might show them they are wrong; they don’t listen well to those around them; and they get trapped in a world they have created rather than the one that exists. Trapped by agreement. Longing for alignment robs you of good ideas. For much of human history, we have needed to make snap judgments about our tribe. Are you with me or against me? If you’re in my tribe, we need to be in relatively easy agreement in order to survive. In fact, connection is so important that our brains have developed so that we experience social pain and physical pain as nearly the same thing. This has been a significant gift; our ability to agree and together create communal outcomes has enabled much of what is great about us. Meanwhile, con-

THE FIVE QUIRKS AND HOW THEY BECOME TRAPS

19

flict has often had pretty dire and disruptive consequences. Disagreement that leads to polarization has led to significant us-versus-them conflicts. In times that are uncertain and changing fast, though, too much agreement, like too much polarization, is a problem. Too much agreement, while pleasant, makes us follow a narrow path rather than expanding our solution space. It makes it harder to create and pursue the wide span of options that will leave us prepared for whatever the uncertain future demands. With complexity, we need diversity of experience, approach, and ideas, and we need to learn how to harness conflict rather than push it away. Trapped by control. Trying to take charge strips you of influence. Humans are made happy by being in control. Leaders seek to keep their hands on budgets and outcomes and behaviors and are often rewarded for doing so (or seeming to do so). In fact, it’s the feeling of being (and looking like) you’re in control and that you’ve planned for all the contingencies that has long defined our image of leadership. This means that if we don’t look or feel in control, we fear we aren’t in fact leading anything—we’re just letting life happen to us. In complex times, though, we cannot control what will happen next; there are too many interrelated parts. And because complex outcomes are hard to produce (or measure), people often exchange simplistic targets for the larger goals they are seeking. When we care about big, complex, intertwined issues, leadership requires the counterintuitive move of letting go of control in order to focus on creating the conditions for good

20

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

things to happen—often with outcomes better than we had originally imagined. Trapped by ego. Shackled to who you are now, you can’t reach for who you’ll be next. Though we rarely admit it to ourselves or others, we also spend quite a lot of our energy protecting our seemingly fragile egos. While humans have a natural drive toward change, we tend to believe that we have changed in the past and won’t change so much in the future. This leads us to a strong and compelling reactive response to protect the person we think we are—in our eyes and in the eyes of others. Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey call this protection “the single biggest cause of wasted resources in nearly every company today.” They explain that it comes from the natural tendency people have of “preserving their reputations, putting their best selves forward, and hiding their inadequacies from others and themselves.”2 When we try to defend our egos rather than grow and change, we end up perfectly designed for a world that happened already, instead of growing better able to handle the world that is coming next. In each case, the first move to escaping the trap is to notice that the trap exists. The second, trickier move is to realize that you are in one. The next move? Finding the key to freedom.

2  T R A P P E D B Y S I M P L E S T O R I E S

Your desire for a simple story blinds you to a real one

“I asked for us to eat in this cafeteria because I wanted to talk to you about something weird happening with my team.” Mark glanced around, voice hushed as Leroy leaned in to listen. “Weird how?” Leroy asked. “Weird weird. I’ll give you a couple of examples, but there is tons of evidence. Kelly invited me to a Google Doc and then uninvited me before I could read it. Marcus has been meeting regularly with my boss, which is obviously unusual, and his name was also on that doc invitation, and so I’m wondering whether there was something in the document or in Marcus’s meetings about me and my performance. Bubbly Kendra always has a smile for everyone and right now she hardly meets my eye at all; she seems incredibly unhappy with me. And twice last week when I asked if they wanted to have drinks together after work, they all sort of glanced around at each other and then said no. And there’s other stuff too—all in the same basic neighborhood. Something is definitely up.” 21

22

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

“What do you think is going on?” Leroy asked, arranging soy sauce and wasabi on his plate of sushi. “I figure they’re mad at me,” Mark said, his mouth full of salad. “I’ve been wracking my brains to figure out exactly which thing might have made them pull back like this, but in truth there are lots of candidates. I told Kendra that her funding had been cut for the conference she was so excited about. And ­Marcus has always wanted my job, and now that I’m doing it so badly he must be circling like a shark. The truth is I’ve been losing my temper and snapping, which I know is terrible be­havior, but I am just at my wits’ end . . . ” Mark trailed off. “So I kind of don’t blame them for being mad, but I don’t like it.” “Wow, so you’re worried you’re in the wrong here. Have you asked any of them about it?” Leroy asked. “Nah, I’m not sure which one to ask or what to say exactly.” Mark glanced around again and lowered his voice. “That’s why I was wondering whether you could kind of hang out with them and casually ask what they’re mad about and then maybe put in a good word for me.” “To be honest, Mark, it sort of sounds like it could be something, but it could also be nothing. You seem to have constructed a pretty tight story about this.” “That’s why I need you to go nose around.” Leroy waved his chopsticks in the air. “Maybe you should investigate a bigger set of possibilities,” he mumbled with his mouth full of sushi. Mark rolled his eyes. “Maybe you should just be my HR guy and go do some HR stuff with my team!” His teasing tone had an edge of anxiety.

T R A P P E D B Y S I M P L E S TO R I E S

23

“Okay, how’s this for a deal? I’ll talk to a few people on your team and if you’re right, I’ll help you figure out what to do next.” “Excellent! That’s my helpful HR guy!” Mark leaned back in his chair and stabbed a wayward cherry tomato that had rolled away from his salad. “I’m not finished yet,” Leroy said. “If you’re wrong about what’s going on because you’ve created some big story about it, I’m going to try out my thinking about those things I was talking to you about last week. And I’m going to test them with Alison too because I have the sense she’s a more diligent student than you. But you’ll have to promise to give me at least thirty minutes of your undivided attention.” Mark popped a piece of Leroy’s sushi into his mouth. “I don’t have thirty minutes, my friend, but anyway that’s an easy deal—I’m not wrong. Talk to them and tell me what you find out.”

T H E S E D U C T I O N A N D DA N G E R O F A S I M P L E S TO RY

Humans have been elevated and connected by stories; our stories have been a source of meaning and solace for us at least from the times our ancestors drew pictures on the walls of caves. Stories about our creation, about our path in life, about our gods—all of these have brought us comfort and purpose. They have freed us from anxiety and from the existential questions about the larger meanings in our short lives. They may even be a core part of

24

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

how we made it to the top of the food chain in the first place.1 The good news is that we are now perfectly wired for stories; the bad news is that our automatic stories are probably too simple for a complex world. As we tell ourselves a story, we begin to believe we have a sense of character, of cause and effect, of what is coming next. Our brains provide that sense, which is reinforced by the well-worn plot elements in movies and novels that have quietly contributed strength to the jaws of this particular trap. It’s not that simple stories are always unhelpful; like all of the mindtraps, this one is a trap because we do not see that we are falling into it. We see what Mark does with story fragments, and we hear Leroy’s caution. Here’s another example. Once upon a time there was a little boy whose high school principal said he would never amount to anything in school and so he shouldn’t even bother graduating. He loved flags. He lived for a time in Nicaragua and for longer in New Zealand. He walked his two dogs through the hills. He got a PhD. He worked in an appliance factory. In the background, your mind is working to put these ideas together and create a narrative without your noticing— it’s what we do to make sense of odd piles of data. You probably have a picture of the man that you don’t remember trying to make: he has a skin color, an accent (American? Spanish? Kiwi?), a height. You probably are putting together the little bits you know about him; maybe he loves to travel because he lived in Nicaragua and New Zealand and that’s

T R A P P E D B Y S I M P L E S TO R I E S

25

why he loves flags? Something about the PhD led him to work in the appliance factory? To make better appliances? You’re not trying to do this, but if you’ve paid attention to the story at all, you’re probably turning these disjointed bits of his life into a story that makes sense. We don’t create stories on purpose most of the time; they are created in the background as we seek to make sense of the often-senseless parts of our lives. And without your noticing it, you’re likely falling into a simple story trap in at least three ways: looking for a beginning, middle, and end; filling in the missing pieces; and assigning roles to the characters. We bel i ev e stori es h ave a be gi nn in g, middle, and en d and we co nne ct cause s an d effects

Our brains have developed to create patterns of beginning, middle, and end for us, and when those patterns are not satisfied (as with a postmodern play, for example), we experience it in our bodies as stress and confusion. This is fine when we are in a theater (and the author is taking care of the narrative arc for us), but it becomes a problem in real life where there are rarely full beginnings or endings to anything. In the story above, you might be wanting to rearrange the pieces (did he live in Nicaragua first or New Zealand? Did he get his PhD first or work in the appliance factory?) to make a narrative with an order that makes sense. In the story of the flag-loving man, I have given you so little data that while you’re ordering it, you’re probably

26

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

not creating a boundary about where it begins and ends. But in our lives we’re always looking for when something begins and ends. When did my realization that I was in a dead-end job begin? When did my delight in my new car end? Mark is falling into this trap as he gathers evidence. His idea that this pattern has begun recently leads him into drawing a boundary around the time where he’s searching for evidence and then stringing together chosen pieces from inside that boundary. This leads him to connect pieces in a way that makes narrative sense and also builds toward a particular simple story. Mark, like the rest of us, is also looking for the causes and effects of that evidence. What made people act this way? What will happen next? One of the great achievements of humans is that we understand cause-and-effect relationships; but we overuse that skill by creating fairly simple connections between cause and effect and then believing in those connections. We are even likely to create causal thinking in the story of the flag-loving man. Perhaps he loves flags because he travels. Or maybe he worked at an appliance factory because his high school principal said he wasn’t academic?2 We see this deep desire for causal thinking as we make sense of tragedies or big surprises. The difference between the way the three nuclear plants near the epicenter of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan fared has been a source of deep inquiry from scholars, policy-makers, researchers, and activists. The three nuclear plants close to the epicenter had totally different outcomes. There was

T R A P P E D B Y S I M P L E S TO R I E S

27

the famous meltdown of Fukushima Daiichi, sending clouds of nuclear gas across Japan and the Pacific Ocean. Less talked about was the much better outcome at the Fukushima Daini plant, which averted a meltdown even though it had fairly similar external circumstances. And the reactor that never made the papers was the Onagawa nuclear plant, which was so safe during the crisis that the townspeople actually sheltered in the nuclear plant rather than fleeing from it after the devastating 9.0 earthquake. To make sense of these differences, researchers search for causality. Depending on which researcher you read (and what part of the disaster they looked at), they might point to the difference in the way the plants were built, the leadership of the plants, the culture of safety, or the particular moves made by particular people in the moments following the disaster.3 Each of these is surely important; deciding which caused the actual outcomes is probably impossible. Did the moves made by the leader of the Fukushima Daini create a better outcome, or did the fact that there was some power at Fukushima Daini create those leadership moves? Was the fact that the Onagawa plant was on much higher land a cause or an effect of the safety culture? In such a complex situation, picking apart the causes from the effects is so tempting, and probably impossible. Even researchers are drawn to create a story—generally a simple one—that focuses on one chain of cause and effects. Once we have a simple story in place, we try to use that to reward the heroes and punish the villains and ensure this never happens again.

28

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

This desire for beginnings and endings, for connecting cause and effect, doesn’t just shape the way we draw boundaries and gather evidence and decide on guilt and innocence; it also shapes how we think about our actions in the future. When we look backward and decide that “a safety culture” kept one plant safe while the others fell apart, we look to create a safety culture at new nuclear plants. When we see that leadership and the relationships the leader had with workers made a difference at another plant, we look to create excellent leaders with close relationships. When we see that Onagawa was on higher ground than the others, we look to build on higher ground. Don’t get me wrong; these are all great things. But in looking to rely on any one of them, we’re missing the point of the interconnections. And if we try to do all of them simultaneously, we might overwhelm the system, and we’ll almost certainly miss out on something else that will shape the outcome next time. We project forwar d f ro m the past into the future and fil l in missin g pi eces so it al l makes sense

This leads me to the second aspect of the simple story trap. We take what we’ve learned from the past and project it forward into the future. Because we crave these simple stories, our brains fill in the missing pieces. And like the rest of the mindtraps, this happens without our even noticing. We are constantly projecting from the things we have seen in the past to what the future will be like. This is the

T R A P P E D B Y S I M P L E S TO R I E S

29

reason for much great literature and art, and it’s also the reason for our conspiracy theories. If there are random dots scattered somewhere, we’ll create patterns, name them, and create stories about them. We call them constellations if they’re in the sky, and these days that feels like mythology. We call them evidence if they’re in our lives, and these days that feels a lot like the truth. It leads us to a kind of “Oh, I’ve seen this before” feeling, when we absolutely haven’t seen this exact situation before. And because we believe in cause and effect, we also fall into thinking that the same causes will have the same effects this time. Imagining the order that comes with the story line, we see signs everywhere we look. (“When he cleared his throat before saying he’d get right back to me about the job, I think that was him saying that he wasn’t going to get back to me at all. My last boss always cleared his throat before saying something soothing but untrue.”) People wrestled to make sense of Donald Trump’s surprise win of the US presidency in 2016. They constantly connected the past to the future, explaining that this was “exactly like” Nixon’s rise to power, or Reagan’s rise to power, or even Hitler’s rise to power. They plucked out particular pieces of history to make their points, sometimes enraging historians whose work they used. One of those historians, Rick Perlstein, wrote about his frustration at the “wave after wave of tweets, Facebook mentions, and appreciative emails thanking me for helping them see how this presidential election is ‘just like’ 1968.

30

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

Or 1972. Or 1964. Or 1976. . . . No, not the Same Thing. History does not repeat itself.”4 To create our simple stories, we pick and choose the data we remember, and we add in little bits of data if it makes for a better case. This has been shown in everything from the research lab to the police station.5 And once again, we don’t do this on purpose—it happens in the background, and then we can’t tell the difference between what we’ve made up and what we saw; it all feels like a memory to us. Now I don’t know if you’re paying real attention here, but this is kind of wacky. You look for patterns from the past that you project into the future; if you can’t find enough data, you make it up; and then you believe that you know what’s going to happen next in your story! And then (if you’re like me) you can start getting anxious about it and whipping yourself into a froth. Not good. In fact, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman tells us: “It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.”6 We create simple cha ra cters an d select data to suppo rt ou r bel ief s

Just as fictional stories have clear protagonists and antagonists and archetypal characters (the irritating mother-inlaw, the misunderstood genius, the dumb but loveable

T R A P P E D B Y S I M P L E S TO R I E S

31

friend), so too do we create what are basically stick-figure drawings of the people in our lives and then believe in them. You can hear it in your own language as you describe people in your life with a phrase. People who are closest to you are usually harder to describe (as Kahneman points out), but people at a slight distance become somehow easier to “understand.” Kahneman found a “halo effect” around the way we think about the people in our lives. We form an opinion about them on one or two things—and fast—and then extend that opinion to cover the rest of them. For example, Kahneman offers descriptions of two men. See which one you’d rather have dinner with: Alan is intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn, and envious Ben is envious, stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious, and intelligent7 Most people in Kahneman’s studies found Alan a more likeable man, but even five more seconds with the data will make you worry about that. Our judgment about these men is formed not only from what we know of them, but from the actual order in which these features appear. If someone annoys you at your first meeting, you might well think of that person as “annoying” in subsequent meetings, no matter what that person is actually like. This “halo” will extend into other aspects of your thinking about the person, so a first impression that’s negative will spread to other aspects of their character you know nothing about; a first impression that’s positive

32

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

spreads too. We claim that we hate obvious stereotypical characters in movies, but we create them constantly in our own lives. Worse, once a hypothesis is made about someone, we select data that supports our hypothesis. The famous and dangerous “confirmation bias” jumps onto our snap judgment to make our first impressions stick. This means that once a person has been identified with a simple story, we look only for the data that confirms our assumptions. We don’t do this on purpose. We simply don’t notice the ways we toss out data that disagrees with our hypothesis. I worked with a CEO once who was struggling with a board member. “He always tries to derail my ideas and find fault with them,” the CEO told me. I watched them together and saw the way they talked, and it was true that they had a more growly relationship than what the CEO had with other members of the board. Yet while disagreeing with some of the CEO’s ideas, the board member seemed to strongly advocate others. When I asked my client about that later, the CEO couldn’t remember a single thing the board member had agreed with. As I listed them, she brushed off the data. She was totally convinced the things I reported hadn’t happened at all. It turns out we have a hard time recognizing the complexity of the situation or the person across from us, particularly if we’re on opposite sides. It is easy to cast the person across from you as the villain in your story without remembering that she is the hero in her own story.

T R A P P E D B Y S I M P L E S TO R I E S

33

“Okay, Mark, I’ve got the real scoop,” Leroy said, poking his head into Mark’s office. “You have time for this or shall I come back later?” Suddenly Mark was full of attention. “I always have time for you, my friend, you know that! Sit anywhere you like.” He grabbed an armful of assorted papers, food wrappers, and clothing items off of the single chair next to his desk, swept them onto the floor, and then stealthily closed the door. Leroy smiled and sat down. “Okay,” he said in hushed tones. “Look, I’ve talked to a bunch of folks, and I think I have an understanding of what’s going on. I particularly noted the data you gave me—Kelly’s Google Doc thing, ­Marcus’s meeting with your boss, Kendra’s lack of eye contact.” His voice dropped lower. “It turns out you do have a big problem.” Mark blanched. “Oh geez! I knew it was bad. They’re mad at me because I’ve been so distracted, right? Or is it Kendra’s conference—they’re all mad at me about that? Or was it the time when I yelled because I was blindsided after missing a deadline. I knew I shouldn’t have yelled. Give it to me straight, Leroy.” “Oooh, I heard about that. And about the way your face gets all red when you yell, and about the way you ordered everyone Thai food afterwards as an apology. They thought the Thai food was a particularly Mark-ish touch.” “Damn, I knew it should have been pizza! Or chocolate. Who apologizes with Thai food?” “And I heard about Kendra’s conference—she is bummed, by the way—and about Marcus and your boss. And here’s

34

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

the thing. Mark,” he said, leaning closer in and dropping his voice, “your problem is you’re full of shit.” Mark cocked his head, trying to take in this message. “Come again?” “They’re not mad. There’s no grand conspiracy theory. Kendra’s cat died and she has been sad about it but feels silly making a big deal about it. Marcus is meeting with your boss to help her plan the yearly all-hands meeting— you must have forgotten you put him on that committee. No one remembers the Google Doc thing—it’s a non-issue, one of those mistakes we make all the time that we don’t even remember making. And nobody wants your job right now, that’s for sure. It’s true they don’t want to go out for drinks with you. It’s not because they’re mad at you because you yelled, but because they really are stressed and worried about missing deadlines. And one of the reasons they care so much isn’t because you’re a screw-up, but because you work so hard and have high standards—and because they care about you and they hate disappointing you. They see how busy you are and they’re worried about you and want to do the best possible job so that you can get a little break.” Mark sighed. “So they wouldn’t tell you the truth? I knew I shouldn’t have sent my best friend in to do this job. I should have sent a stranger. Who do you think could get the real deal out of them?” “No, Mark! I’m not wrong.” Leroy didn’t mind the level of his voice now. “You’re wrong. They’re not lying—they’re telling me the truth. The truth is that there is no problem. Or, there are problems but there are millions of little ones.

T R A P P E D B Y S I M P L E S TO R I E S

35

Bubbly Kendra is just sad these days. She loved the cat, she wanted to go to the conference, and she hates her roommate. Marcus is feeling really stretched with the various projects he’s put his hand up for. You’re right that he’s ambitious, and he stresses himself out terribly looking to not only do everything right but to be seen as doing everything right. But the thing that rings out is that even with the stress and the sadness, all of them are delighted to be on this team working for you, although there were many, many mentions of how stressed you seem, how totally out of control the work is.” Leroy sat back in the chair only to pull forward again—why was a feather boa tickling his neck? “And now, on to our deal.” “What deal?” Mark fiddled with his phone. “Leroy, how can you be sure they’re not just feeding you a line because they know you’re my friend?” “I am telling you that I gathered data and people were straight with me; you have strung together a story on weak thread. You plucked pieces of evidence to highlight the story you were anxious about, and ignored the rest. You have shorthand for people in your life: Bubbly Kendra. Ambitious Marcus. And you’ve made it all about you. I’m telling you, Mark, this one isn’t about you. It’s about the work and the volume and the volatility and complexity of it all. It’s true that you’re not making it any easier on them with your behavior toward them and now your paranoia. All of this is why our deal is so important. This is the first of those traps your mind sets for you—the mindtraps I’ve been seeing in you and everyone else around me. This belief in simple

36

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

stories is holding you back. You, my friend, need to escape this trap, or else you’ll just circle around in it forever.”

K E YS TO U N LO C K O U R S I M P L E S TO R I E S

The bad news is that there is no way to stop experiencing the biological pulls toward simple stories. Because this all happens without your noticing it, you cannot stop it from happening. You’ll make simple stories and believe in them; you’ll project the past forward onto the present; you’ll create character roles that are based on very little; and you’ll select data to reinforce the simple stories and characters you already have. This is all going to happen hundreds of times every day. Like all of the mindtraps, these happen because they mostly work for us. They probably used to be even more effective in a simple world with fewer possibilities and interconnections. So you don’t need to stop using these stories; you just need to interrupt yourself when you start to believe in them and they constrain your world. Here are two keys to help open the trap. Key questi on : How is th is per son a hero?

When you realize that you’re carrying a simple story about a person or a group of people, it can be useful to name the role you think they’re playing and then intentionally switch the role and see what that allows. Do you believe that your colleague is always undermining you

T R A P P E D B Y S I M P L E S TO R I E S

37

and trying to make you look bad in front of the boss? See if you can reframe her actions as the hero in her story rather than the villain in yours. She doesn’t go home at night and cackle over her cauldron about the ways she screwed you today. She tells herself she is doing things for the greater good and that she is acting in a heroic way. See if you can take her perspective, even for a moment. Perhaps she sees you undermining her and she’s trying to show your boss her hard work. Or perhaps what you call undermining she calls critically examining, or whatever. This can be equally hard but also helpful for other roles. Think your little brother is playing the role of the drifter and not taking responsibility for things? I’m guessing your little brother doesn’t get off the phone with you, put his feet up on the furniture, and feel delighted that he can drift some more, responsibility-free. What other roles could a character have in a story that would make him more heroic? Perhaps the adventurer or explorer would be another way of framing the same set of data. Or the one who is lost and searching. Or just the one who cares less about the things you care about, but who still cares deeply about many things. This is not to say that there aren’t those in your life who are villainous, who aren’t mishandling responsibility. It’s just to say that you can’t trust what your brain automatically tells you about those people without really exploring alternatives. In complex settings, your simple stories will dramatically limit the range of thinking and feeling about what’s possible. Using this question as a key

38

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

will unlock your simplistic framing of others and help you live more into the world of bigger possibility. Key h abit: Carry three d iff eren t stories

As you find yourself asking about the characters of others, you can begin to branch out and muse about the whole story you’re telling yourself. To disrupt the simple stories you tell, you can develop the habit of carrying multiple stories about the events in your life. The best way I’ve found to do that is to notice your story and then create another one. And then another. And another. When you know that if this initiative wins it will be disastrous, see if you can create another story that turns out differently. When you hear yourself saying, “I’ve seen this before and I know just how it goes,” remind yourself that if the situation is truly complex, you haven’t seen something quite like it before and you have no idea where it goes. Think of these as the opportunities to do a kind of mental yoga and stretch yourself into a new place. As with real yoga, the practice of doing this over time will make you more flexible, and allow you to act more effectively in complexity. This is a little different from scenario planning, which asks you to imagine a variety of different futures so that you can pick one to work toward—and be prepared in case the chosen one doesn’t happen. Here you’re not wanting to settle on a few possibilities to work toward. Instead, you’re using the fact that you can come up with

T R A P P E D B Y S I M P L E S TO R I E S

39

different possibilities to increase the likelihood that you’ll be ready for any of them, or for another one you can’t yet imagine. If you’re sure one thing will happen, you’ll close down to evidence that points at another thing. If you’re aiming at a single story you like best, you won’t notice a better one that you might not have thought about. As complexity theorist Peter Coleman writes, “Life, so full of contradictions and surprises, rarely ever makes complete sense. The pieces of the puzzle seldom fit together perfectly. When they do—beware.”8 The point isn’t to avoid telling stories. You can’t. The point isn’t even to avoid telling simple stories. I think that’s too hard as well. The point is to notice your simple stories, remember they’re simple, believe in them less, and use this habit to multiply the options you are considering. The point is to understand that in a complex world a simple story is just about always wrong, and will just about always lead us to an emaciated, impoverished set of choices. Escape the simple stories trap for a cornucopia of possibilities in a complex world.

3  T R A P P E D B Y R I G H T N E S S

Just because it feels right doesn’t mean it is right

“So Leroy has this crazy idea that I need to be asking new questions about my simple stories, but it seems like pretty useless advice,” Mark told Alison over Saturday morning coffee at the park, as Naomi and Tate raced around the playground. “Seriously, I get that it would be nice for me to have all that time so I could come up with multiple stories and seek for the hero perspective and all, but I think I’ll have to be retired to even begin to add one of those practices into my already outrageously packed day.” “Are you kidding?” Alison asked. “You tortured yourself for hours with that simple story about how everyone hated you and they were out to get you. You wasted a ton of time ruminating over this and gathering evidence that you were right! If you had that as just one story among many, you’d have saved yourself heaps of time—and more importantly, heaps of misery.” “But all the evidence pointed in the same direction!” Mark stammered, spilling some of his coffee in his exuberance. “It all just seemed so obvious and logical.” 40

TRAPPED BY RIGHTNESS

41

“You’re still doing it!” Alison laughed, popping the last of the pumpkin spice muffin in her mouth. “Didn’t Leroy say that in a complex situation, having something seem obvious and logical is itself a danger sign?” “Argh! There’s another stupid idea of his! Are you telling me that every time something seems obvious and logical I have to question it? This is impossible! Let’s focus on your job for a while and see what you think when we try to use Leroy’s mindtraps to help you.” Alison finished her cappuccino as she recounted the story of the organizational change she was making and the reaction of the board so far. She concluded: “So everyone gets that this is the only way to go. The question is how to implement it. It’s sure to be a massive shock to the organization and the partners are going to have to start doing wholly different things that they are not going to be that confident about—or, quite frankly, that they’re very good at right now. I somehow need to convince them that the only way forward is to change. A lot.” Mark smiled. “Wow. There were a lot of words in that statement that looked certain to me. ‘Only way to go.’ ‘Start doing wholly different things.’ ‘Only way forward.’ You might be trapped too.” Alison blinked. “But that’s why they hired me. Because they know they can’t keep on like this and they’re counting on me to help them change.” “I get it!” Mark said, and then laughed. “But Leroy has been yammering on and on about how certainty is one of the mindtraps. He said that when I know I’m right, it cuts

42

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

off good stuff like learning and exploration. I notice that you sound just as certain as me, so maybe you’re just as trapped as I am!” “Are you telling me that seeming clear about something is a problem?” Alison asked slowly. “I mean, are you saying it’s better leadership to not have any idea what to do?” “Hmm. That can’t be right either. I’m just telling you what Leroy told me. After all that annoying simple-story crap, he told me that certainty is just as big a problem.” “Okay, okay, maybe you’re right,” Alison said with a smile. “I’m beginning to get what you were saying before. These mindtraps are totally annoying. Maybe we should tell Leroy we’re certain he’s wrong.”

T H E S E D U C T I O N A N D DA N G E R O F R I G H T N E S S

One of the great differences between human beings and all other creatures on the planet, we have been told, is our capacity for rational thought, for weighing possibilities and carefully crafting our opinions, beliefs, and decisions. We can generally take any opinion we have and explain very logically why the opinion is the right one, gathering evidence thoughtfully to show why we are certain. The only problem with this notion is that the feeling of certainty is less like a Platonic decision and more like an emotion that arises, regardless of evidence one way or another. In fact, neurologist Robert Burton writes: “Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar

TRAPPED BY RIGHTNESS

43

states of ‘knowing what we know’ arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason.”1 Just take that in for a moment. Your sense of being right about something, the sparkling clarity of certainty, is not a thought process, not a reasoning process, but an emotion that has nothing to do with whether you are right or not. Our brain has evolved to trick us about this. When we feel right about something, and someone asks us why, we’ll be quick to offer a reason explaining our actions. What psychologists find time after time, though, is that those explanations are mostly postdecision justifications rather than a considered decision-making process beforehand. Why? Because we didn’t need to make a decision; we just felt we knew what to do. In the United States right now, in the age of Trump, there is a whole lot of rightness on both sides of the highly polarized political spectrum and each side is baffled and horrified at the capacity of the other side to believe they’re right about anything. But when you see that the sense of rightness is an emotion rather than a logic, suddenly it all makes sense. In the face of what looks like weak evidence to one side, the sense that other people believe it and think it’s right seems bewildering. But the fact that people might be angry or frightened in the face of a changing world seems totally understandable. Rightness is just an emotional cousin of these other reactions. You might be arguing with me in your head right now. “I make thoughtful decisions!” you might be saying. “I

44

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

really weigh my options and sometimes I even have a hard time knowing what to do and I’ll go and research what’s best.” I get it. In truth, I feel that way about myself too. I read Consumer Reports before I buy a microwave, and I read all the different platform positions before I head to the voting booth. In fact, I could offer you a handful of examples just from today where I really deliberated hard and researched before coming to a conclusion. I have had to read many, many research studies and books to come to believe that you and I deliberate thoughtfully on only a tiny percentage of the decisions we make each day. The rest of them we just make because it feels right. By now I’ve read and researched enough to believe that perhaps feeling right isn’t the best approach. It turns out that we can’t tell the difference between our opinion and the truth, and that shapes what we notice— and how we treat other people. Our f el t e xperi en ce of o ur opin ion i s that it’s right

When I ask people around the world “What does it feel like to be wrong?” they give me descriptions of woe. It’s embarrassing. It’s distressing. You feel stupid and uncomfortable. When I point out that that’s what it feels like to learn you are wrong and ask them the question again about what it feels like to be wrong, I generally get long silences as people try to figure out what that feeling is. “Um, I don’t think it feels like anything,” people will say sometimes, haltingly. And I think that’s almost right.

TRAPPED BY RIGHTNESS

45

Perhaps a more exact answer is that what it feels like to be wrong—before we find out that we’re wrong—is the same as what it feels like to be right.2 So, what does it feel like to be right? I ask people this question too. And now they struggle from the outset. It feels comfortable. Confident. In one large conference hall, after a moment, a voice piped up from the middle of the room: “It feels normal! ” The whole room laughed— he was the CEO and had a reputation for believing he was right. But he was actually naming something we don’t tend to think about. We tend to think we’re right most of the time. Daniel Kahneman summed up one of his core findings from his work as “our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in.”3 For it to be so widespread, such a tendency was probably adaptive and helpful and good. If we thought we were wrong most of the time, we’d be paralyzed. You can imagine two of our forebears, wandering through the jungle and hearing a crackling noise. One thinks, “That sounds like a big dangerous animal—I should run!” and she runs. The other thinks, “That sounds like a big dangerous animal, but it could be just about anything, really. I don’t know, I’m never sure about these things and don’t want to leap to conclusions,” and she might be lunch. Or she might discover something wonderful. And therein is the rub. Not believing we’re right can lead us to vacillate

46

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

and falter—or to explore and learn new things. Believing we’re right leads us to march confidently in a determined direction—which might be off the edge of a cliff. To add to the difficulty, even if we look for data to make a decision, our automatic sense of rightness shapes what we find. Our experi en ce of r ightn ess ki l ls curiosity and openn ess to data th at pro ves u s wrong

The trap about our feeling of rightness is that it’s often a self-fulfilling prophesy. We are sure we’re right, and so we don’t notice (or we discard) any data that might suggest we’re wrong. As I was drafting this chapter, US president Donald Trump tweeted, “Any negative polls are fake news.” This is what our brains are mostly tweeting all the time to us. We dismiss things that contradict our sense of rightness because they feel, well, wrong to us. This as you can tell is the death of curiosity. “Certainty is a cruel mind-set,” Ellen Langer tells us. “It hardens our minds against possibility.” While it feels good to be right, it actually shuts us down to some of our best human traits—openness, curiosity, wonder. If our simple stories shape the data we notice and the way we package it to ourselves, our automatic feeling of rightness creates a lockdown in our information search. Just imagine the difference between wondering whether the capital of New York state is New York City and knowing that it is. If you wonder, you might ask (and find out the capital is Albany). If you’re sure, you’ll just keep saying it and not even notice

TRAPPED BY RIGHTNESS

47

that you’re wrong. This is obviously connected not only to our search for information but to how we talk with others. Science is filled with examples where knowing something was right meant that people ignored the ways they were wrong—often costing lives in the process. One of my favorite examples of this is the discovery of the benefits of handwashing in 1847 by Ignaz Semmelweis. Semmelweis, a doctor in a maternity hospital in Vienna, was captivated by the question of why women were dying so frequently from “childbed fever” at one hospital in town and so much less frequently in the other. He didn’t fully believe the myriad causes of childbed fever that other doctors seemed to believe in, and his investigations led him to find that careful washing of hands and equipment would cut down the deaths of these women dramatically. Unfortunately for him and the pregnant women of Vienna, his colleagues were so certain that they were right about childbed fever that they ignored his data and his findings. The frustration of that literally drove him crazy: he ended up dying in an insane asylum. Today of course the idea that doctors should wash their hands is totally obvious—and has saved millions and millions of lives—but back then it was absurd. Our experi en ce of r ightn ess ch ang es the wa y we tre at oth er peo pl e

Imagine you’re in a meeting with the executive team and you’re presenting the final recommendations of a piece of

48

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

work your team has been engaged in for the last month. You’ve been over every last piece of the data and you know exactly what should be done, and now you’re just informing the team and getting their approval. A new colleague, who has joined the team since the last time you’ve presented on this topic, begins to ask questions no one has raised before. Your emotional reaction is 1. Defensive but confident. You and your team are the experts. You know how to lob answers back to all these tricky questions. He’s probably just trying to make an impression on the boss. 2. Annoyed and offended. Who does this guy think he is to march in here and waste everyone’s time with immaterial questions? He’s so arrogant to think that he could have things to add with no knowledge about this at all. 3. Open and curious. How great that you could have thought about it so much and still have someone who had questions you hadn’t thought about before! What a helpful addition this guy will be to the senior team with such an unusual perspective and a curious mind! Here’s the thing: no one ever says the third response. That’s because our sense of rightness not only changes what we think; it changes how we behave. If you’re open and puzzling about something and someone comes along and asks you questions about it, that seems like a great benefit (in fact, you might even pay someone to do that because

TRAPPED BY RIGHTNESS

49

it’s so helpful). If you’re sure about something and someone comes along and asks you questions about it, that seems like an annoyance. And how you show up with that person will change dramatically based on your mind-set. We have given a case study to leaders around the world asking them to give a small piece of feedback to someone in a role play and then listen to what the person says. The small piece of feedback (about how “Sam” behaved in an unexpected way during a meeting) tends to create a whole back story in someone’s mind (and of course, it’s a simple story). Then, when Sam gives her perspective, the person playing the boss is supposed to listen. But because the boss’s perspective is so shaped—and so closed—by the tiny bit of information about Sam, these leaders from around the world simply cannot listen to Sam. They find her perspective a distraction or a mistaken view and they try to get her back onto the subject at hand: what she’s done wrong and how to fix it. They are trapped by their rightness, even knowing the entire scenario is fake! Sam generally leaves the meeting feeling unappreciated and unheard. And she’s right: her important new perspective is generally ignored. Alison could feel the irritation rising as her lunch guest took a quick gulp of air before continuing his tirade about her proposed changes. It was these most senior guys who were the most defensive about the status quo, she knew, and James was a dinosaur. But he was an important voice among the senior partners, and she had been hoping to get

50

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

him on her side. Twenty minutes into their one-hour lunch, though, he had talked almost without pause, his salad untouched in front of him. Alison had done a good job listening, she thought, as James yammered away, and she had eaten her salad purposefully, hoping that he would eventually run out of steam. But so far, no luck. At this point, it would be time for her next meeting before they even served the main course. Alison’s phone buzzed and she saw it was from home. Naomi was sick today and Mark was working at home and looking after her. Alison excused herself from the table for a moment. “Hey, Mark, is everything okay?” she asked, a little anxiously. “No. I can’t find the rice. She only wants rice and I can’t find it anywhere,” Mark answered, a little harried. “So Naomi is or is not okay?” Alison asked, an edge of irritation in her voice. “No, she’s sick. And whiney like mad. She wants the same book over and over and I can’t get anything done. And she wants rice pudding the way you make it. And I have no idea how that is and I can’t even find the damn rice!” “You really can’t call me out of a lunch with a vital senior partner and ask me about recipes,” Alison hissed. “Google ‘rice pudding.’ And look in the canister in the pantry that says ‘Rice’ on it.” “I hope you’re listening to your vital senior partner better than you’re listening to me!” Mark snapped. “Looks like that openness and curiosity crap we worked on this weekend was a waste of time.”

TRAPPED BY RIGHTNESS

51

Alison heard a tearful “Daddy, I want rice pudding now!” in the background and the line went dead. She nearly dialed Mark back to tell him what a great listener she was to people who were sensible and thoughtful, when she caught herself. This was the trap Leroy had warned them about—the trap that said it was our own sense of rightness that made us think someone was sensible and thoughtful or not. Agree with me, and you’re right! Disagree with me, and you’re complaining and difficult. No wonder James had been yammering on and on about the same points all during lunch. He felt like she wasn’t listening to him. And while her ears were present and she was making umm-hmm noises, he was right. She wasn’t genuinely listening at all. Alison took a deep breath. What were the keys for getting out of this trap? She hoped she could find them before the main course arrived.

K E YS TO U N LO C K O U R R I G H T N E S S

Of course, it isn’t that feeling right is always wrong. Feeling right feels great—we feel confident and on top of things and know what to do next. The only reason it’s a mindtrap is because that feeling of rightness is unfortunately unconnected to whether we are, in fact, right. This means that sometimes you’ll feel right and be right and sometimes you’ll feel exactly the same way but be exactly wrong. I think of this as the rightness hangover: it feels great in the moment but not so good the next morning. To see whether you’re in the rightness trap and to climb your way out, here are a couple of keys for your ring.

52

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

Key questi on s: Wha t do I bel i eve and how cou ld I be wron g?

I collect questions. I’ve written about the power of asking different questions and have been on a constant quest for the most powerful and useful questions around. You’ll see throughout this book that I orient to questions as ways to help us out of traps; I’m certain about the benefits of curiosity! Two of the most useful, most transformative questions in my tool kit are also the most helpful ones here in the trap of our rightness: What do I believe? and, How could I be wrong? What do I believe? is an important question for two opposite reasons. The first is that without it we often believe things without noticing we have a belief; it feels like noticing the truth. Those shoes are ugly. That politician is lying. That new direction for our company is the only way to go. Those feel like statements of truth and not statements of belief to us. But noticing them as beliefs puts just a tiny bit of daylight between what we believe and our sense that it is objectively true. I believe those shoes are ugly. I believe that politician is lying. I believe this new direction for our company is the only way to go. Naming these as our beliefs opens up the possibility that we or others could have other beliefs and not simply be wrong. The second reason is the opposite. Sometimes we really don’t know what we believe. We spin around, bouncing between possibilities, and lose our way. In this case, What

TRAPPED BY RIGHTNESS

53

do I believe? can be incredibly grounding. Even at a time when the way is unclear and the various forces push in one direction and then another, there are at least some things you believe. Naming them can be like dropping the keel in place on a little sailboat—suddenly you’re not quite so buffeted by the wind as you were before. Either way you use it, this question is most helpfully combined with How could I be wrong? It is perhaps the question I have found most useful of all because it busts me out of the trap of rightness. This question has opened up new strategic possibilities in organizations and new career possibilities in executives. One senior leader was just about to retire and was pondering his next steps. As he thought about his postretirement, he was working himself into a frenzy, meeting with potential new colleagues and clients and sketching out his next steps. When he asked himself, What do I believe? he noticed he was working from an assumption (which felt like the truth) that he needed to have a clear plan for how he’d spend his time in this next chapter of his life. As a man who had had a full diary for the last forty years, he was dreading the idea that he might have an empty diary and was actively seeking to fill his time. The question, How could I be wrong? stumped him for a while—he was just so sure that figuring out today what he would be doing next month was the right choice. When he began to muse about how he could be wrong, he wondered whether his focus on the next chapter was foreclosing his joy at this current chapter. Furthermore,

54

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

he wondered whether better opportunities would arise four or six months after his retirement that he would be unable to take advantage of if he had leapt without looking. He decided to experiment with not filling his diary and with answering people’s questions about his plans with “I’m not sure yet. I’m just enjoying this chapter as it closes.” And he found, much to his surprise, that he was really enjoying this chapter. A year later he realized that without those questions he would have missed out on one of the most gratifying parts of his career: the series of celebrations and conversations and goodbyes that marked the end of this time in his life. And he would have missed out on some interesting new possibilities that emerged in the months after his retirement. Asking what he believed and how he could be wrong changed his approach—and his life. Key move: Li ste ni ng to l earn

If asking questions of ourselves is pivotal to escaping the rightness trap, the way we respond to others can keep us out of the trap over time. The most important escape move when we are trying to get out of the rightness trap is to change the way we listen. It turns out that much of the time we listen to win. You know, the kind of listening that tries to make you right and the other person wrong. Right now you might be reading this and thinking to yourself, “Wow, Jennifer doesn’t know me at all, does she? I’m a really good listener and I never make people

TRAPPED BY RIGHTNESS

55

wrong.” If you’ve got any of those thoughts in your head, you were just listening to win. This is not because we are necessarily trying to be belligerent or to have an argument. Often we listen to win for the nicest possible motivations. In person, it looks more like this: your colleague or partner will say, “I’m frustrated that no one really even notices how much I contribute!” And you say, “I’m sure everyone is grateful for how good your work is!” That might be true—and sometimes it might even be helpful—but you’ve listened to what she said in order to negate it. The second most common form of listening we think about is listening to fix. You know this one too, I’m sure. It’s when someone comes to you and you think, “Oh, I can help you with that!” So when your friend says, “I’m frustrated that no one really even notices how much I contribute,” you say something like, “Have you tried making a list of everything you’ve accomplished and letting people know?” That might be a good suggestion, and it might be helpful to the other person, too, but it’s not really listening to what is true for your friend right now. What these two forms of listening have in common is that they both start with our belief that we are right in some way. And we might be. But in a world where things are moving really fast and are more complex than our brains can easily handle, these forms of listening strengthen the rightness trap. What we need to escape the trap is listening to learn.

56

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

Listening to learn requires that we watch our assumption that we are right (and we can either make the problem go away by winning or make it go away by fixing) and instead believe that the other person has something to say that we don’t understand and therefore can’t immediately help or make the problem go away. Listening to learn requires that we hold off and try to deeply understand for a few minutes. So when you hear, “I’m frustrated that no one really even notices how much I contribute,” you could try a listening-to-learn move: “Hmm. So it feels like you’re contributing a lot but you don’t get any recognition?” (You have to say this in an open and curious voice, like you really are wanting to learn, or else it can come across as snarky.) Then your colleague, partner, or friend might say, “Yes, totally!” or, “Well, that’s just it. I’m not even sure that I am contributing because I never get any feedback.” Or, “Kind of. I guess I’m wondering whether I rely too much on the feedback of others rather than really knowing in myself what good work looks like.” Or something else. The point is that if you are careful to mistrust the emotion of rightness from the beginning, you might find yourself hearing things that open up whole new possibilities for solutions. Believing we’re right narrows and closes down possibilities. And mostly we don’t even notice we’re doing it— that’s why it’s a mindtrap. But if we hold the possibility that we might be wrong, whole new vistas open for us. We become more curious, better listeners, and better problem-solvers.

TRAPPED BY RIGHTNESS

57

Back to Kathryn Shultz, who knows quite a lot about rightness (and wrongness). She tells us: “We are wrong about what it means to be wrong. Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition. Far from being a moral flaw, it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honorable qualities: empathy, optimism, imagination, conviction, and courage. And far from being a mark of indifference or intolerance, wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change. Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world.”4 Escaping the rightness mindtrap might just make us better humans.

4  T R A P P E D B Y A G R E E M E N T

Longing for alignment robs you of good ideas

“Excellent news, team,” Mark said, bursting into the meeting room Leroy had arranged for a meeting with Alison. “I’m a little late, but not because my team meeting ran over. My meeting was smooth as silk today because we were totally in agreement about every single move. I think I’m really getting the hang of this complexity stuff—it was like a welloiled machine!” Alison and Leroy burst into laughter. “What? Is there something between my teeth?” Mark stabbed at his teeth with his fingernails. “Or my fly ... ?” he looked down. “No, we were just talking about the next mindtrap,” Alison told him, still giggling. “And, er, then you burst in so pleased with how you’d fallen into it.” “Impossible!” Mark said. “I was totally trapless at this meeting, I’m telling you! I questioned my simple stories. I asked what I believed and how I could be wrong. And, as a reward, the whole team fell into line!” 58

T R A P P E D B Y AG R E E M E N T

59

“So you did all the things we have been talking about?” Leroy asked. Mark nodded happily. “And then there was so little disagreement on your team that the meeting felt smooth and easy, like a well-oiled machine with all the parts working together seamlessly?” Mark nodded again. “Exactly! None of our usual squabbling or desire to fight it out to see who has the best solution. Kendra came up with an excellent idea and I used the whole ‘What do we believe and how could we be wrong?’ to understand the objections of the rest of the group. Then I hit them with some ‘listening to learn’ about how they really did seem to be leaning toward Kendra’s ideas after all. Once they felt heard, they were able to put down their concerns and they really rallied around her excellent idea. It was the one-two punch of greatness and it totally worked! Leroy, you’re a genius!” “You ‘hit them’ with listening to learn?” Leroy asked, trying to keep a straight face. “Perhaps that wasn’t the best phrasing,” Mark explained. “What I meant was that I could hear the alignment underneath the objections, so I just snuck in some good listening so they could hear it too.” “So you listened so that they could learn,” Alison pointed out, helpfully. “Exactly! And they did!” “I think that’s called ‘listening to fix’ or maybe even ‘listening to win,’” Leroy pointed out. “No way! I was just listening so that they would be able to hear each other better and ... ” Mark trailed off. “Crap. I

60

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

was totally listening to fix. Or win.” He slumped back in his chair, crestfallen. “But Leroy, it worked so well!” “Leroy was just beginning to tell me about the mindtrap of agreement,” Alison said, smiling. “Now I think he’ll have an even easier way to describe it.”

T H E S E D U C T I O N A N D DA N G E R O F AG R E E M E N T

Humans are drawn to agreement as a sense of connection. It’s deep in our systems as an early force of our survival. We have evolved as fangless and clawless creatures who cannot run as fast as either our predators or our prey, and yet we have found ourselves at the top of the food chain. Our capacity to collaborate in groups makes up for our physical deficiencies; in order for humans to be willing to sacrifice their own best interests for the greater good, humans needed to be wired for connection. The neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman’s groundbreaking research shows that our brains make us particularly sensitive to social interactions. Lieberman found that social pain— from the biggies like heartbreak and rejection to the more daily pain of thinking people don’t like you or that you’re being left out—is experienced in the brain in exactly the same way physical pain is experienced. Just take that in for a minute. Thinking as Mark does, in the second chapter, that your work friends are leaving you out or talking about you behind your back causes the same sort of pain you’d get if you broke your ankle.1 No wonder we are so

T R A P P E D B Y AG R E E M E N T

61

anxious for everyone to get along! Lieberman writes of our “Faustian evolutionary bargain” that allows humans to have such large brains and the capacity to communicate and work together in large groups, but that “requires us to pay for it with the possibility of pain, real pain, every time we connect with another human being who has the power to leave us or withhold love.” This drive is a piece of the puzzle about why disagreements at work are so difficult to handle well. You can see how our aversion to social pain (even when we do not consciously notice that we are averse to it) could push us toward a sort of false agreement if we feared being rejected in some way. This can be even more frustrating when someone agrees with you when he’s with you but then agrees in the opposite direction when he’s with folks who believe the opposite. (This is particularly challenging when a leader agrees with her boss when she’s with her boss and then agrees with her direct reports when she’s with her direct reports.) It turns out that we are wired to have some unhelpful ways of dealing with agreement. These are mindtraps when we believe that agreeability is a virtue and that disagreement should be fixed with compromise. In this case, the trap swings both ways. We are desperate for agreement with people we associate with. But if our disagreement becomes entrenched (generally with one group lining up against another group), we tend to polarize. Both our agreement and our polarization are a trap in complexity.

62

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

We bel i eve tha t agreeabi l ity is a virtue

It is hardwired into us that getting along with one another is a good thing. When a couple is first dating, they automatically cycle through various parts of their lives and find areas of agreement, and when they hit on one of those areas their brains release dopamine. It literally feels good to agree just as it literally feels bad to face social pain. At many of the organizations I work with, the idea that people are genuinely good people who get along (often “like family”) is a highlight of the culture.2 In fact, Daniel Coyle found in the high-performing organizations on whose cultures he reports in The Culture Code that the word “family” was the most common descriptor.3 And yet our family instincts, no matter how pleasant and useful, leave us at a disadvantage in complexity. Psychologists have been watching groups interact for years and trying to figure out why groups tend to ignore the fullness of the ideas and the data they have and instead simply cycle over what has been agreed on already. Researchers have found that we are more likely to talk about data other people have already talked about and we’re sure they will approve of, even if it means withholding vital information. So hard is it, psychologically, to bring up something that goes against the general opinions of the group that psychologists call the withholding of new information “social loafing” (excellent term, right?).4 That is, if Quinn and Arnee both talk about

T R A P P E D B Y AG R E E M E N T

63

how customers are complaining about the new season’s products, Janet is more likely to do some “social loafing”—to share her experience with customer complaints even when she has also experienced customers who love the products. This means that rather than understanding the whole of a topic or issue—including those pesky pieces of data we might disagree about—we home in on what we think other people will like. All of this means that we withhold contradictory data so necessary to finding good solutions in complexity. We drive disagreement underground. At organizations where people most want to belong, the fear of not belonging is amplified. Here people whisper, “Folks around here are trying so hard to be nice to each other that they’re not willing to be honest about anything anymore.” This desire to be agreeable can sap us of our courage—to say hard things, to experiment (and risk failure), to surface conflict in the face of the seeming agreement of others. The disagreement is still there even when we don’t talk about it, so it leaks out in small ways: in the noncompliance with a decision the group seemed to make together, with the meetings before the meetings to get people lined up on your side, the meetings after the meetings to deconstruct what happened and decide what to actually do, and so on. This way of operating is obviously time-consuming because we have to have many more meetings and often the decisions we make don’t stick because they weren’t genuine agreements. But time isn’t the biggest wasted

64

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

resource of the mindtrap of agreement. Without the clashing of perspectives, we get far fewer options for action. In fact, we try to merge our perspectives and compromise. We bel i eve tha t our di sag re eme nt sho uld be f ixed with compromise

We are taught as small people that when we disagree, we should compromise. You give a little, I give a little, and eventually we meet in the middle. We see this at work and at home. It doesn’t seem fair for one side or the other side to win, and so we are drawn to having each side lose a little so that we can come together on a legitimate solution. Lieberman has studied fairness extensively as well, and notes that when we think something is fair, it lights up the dopamine receptors in the brain—exactly the same ones that light up when we have a pleasurable physical experience like eating chocolate. This leads Lieberman to conclude, tongue in cheek, that “fairness tastes like chocolate.”5 This means we are built for compromise. Study after study have shown that we will work against our own best interest as long as we believe it would be more fair (or rather less unfair)—and fairness seems to look quite a lot like compromise to our brains. This makes sense evolutionarily, when we were needing to live in communities and figure out how to work together, share the spoils from a hunt, and begin to trade with one another. In simple situations, compromise may well be the best option. If I

T R A P P E D B Y AG R E E M E N T

65

want to buy a pair of shoes from you for four chickens and you want to sell them for six chickens, then maybe five chickens is the right trade. But if I want to expand our product offerings to include seven-to-twelve-year-olds and you want to expand them to include forty-five-tosixty-year-olds, it’s probably not particularly helpful for each to give a little and focus on thirty-one-year-olds. So while compromise might feel fair, in complex situations it’s often the wrong way to go because compromise tends to merge two options into one. In complexity, having more options is always better, because you can’t possibly know beforehand which options will actually pay off. So the urge to compromise in complexity takes you from two viable options to one potentially mediocre one. Not a win, even if it does taste like chocolate to our brains. Whe n we cann ot co mpromi se, we pol arize

There’s another piece to this agreement mindtrap about how our reflexes are not suited for a complex world. And because we are humans, this one pushes us in exactly the opposite direction. If we cannot find a compromise, our tendency is to abandon compromise, collect a group around us, and polarize. This tendency is all too real to us after the big upsets of Brexit and Trump. But in most intractable and complex conflicts, it turns out that our pattern is to oversimplify the issues (you’ve seen this mindtrap before) and then

66

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

believe that people who think like us are right and people who think another thing are the enemy. Peter Coleman, who studies intractable conflicts, reminds us that “the press for certainty and coherence is a basic tendency in life greatly intensified by conflict. . . . And it often contributes to our total misreading of events.”6 This misreading means that hearing counterevidence about a thing we believe in deeply actually serves not to loosen our opinions to allow for new possibilities, but to reinforce our certainty in what we believed before. Hugh Mackay calls this the phenomenon of data “strengthening our cages,” keeping us locked in our previous positions and in more entrenched ways. It also makes us a little paranoid, thinking other people or groups are out to get us. For example, Robert Vallone and his colleagues gave self-­identified pro-Arab and pro-Jewish Stanford students a series of news clippings relating to the ­Jewish-Palestinian conflict.7 Each group was frustrated by the bias in the articles that disadvantaged their group and unfairly promoted the views of the other side. The hook, of course, is that the articles were the same for both groups. “Thai food again?” Marcus asked as he walked into the conference room. “You didn’t even yell at us.” Mark gave his crooked smile and dipped a spring roll into sweet chili sauce as his teammates sat down. “I was trying to be disarming,” he said with his mouth full. “How’d I do?” “Not enough vegetarian options. Again,” said Kendra. “Ooh, but you remembered that lemongrass tofu was my favorite!”

T R A P P E D B Y AG R E E M E N T

67

Mark wiped his hands and picked up a whiteboard marker. “Okay, the reason I’ve called you all together again after yesterday’s incredibly successful—” “And fast!” Marcus broke in. “And fast meeting is because actually I think we were agreeing too much, and I want to just see if we can get more ideas on the table.” “Did you say you think we agreed too much?” Kelly asked. “Um, are you sure that’s just soy sauce you’ve just poured all over your Thai basil chicken?” “Yep,” Mark said. “I have been talking to Leroy again—” “Yay for Leroy!” Kendra cheered. “And Leroy has noted that perhaps we came to convergence a little early yesterday. It’s not that Kendra’s ideas aren’t spectacular, but perhaps we should have just checked to see whether there were other ideas as well.” “Urgh, are you suggesting that we go back to the drawing board?” Kelly groaned. “Why are you torturing us? We never make decisions as fast as we did yesterday!” “Okay, but here’s the question,” Mark continued. “I’m not suggesting that we not carry on with Kendra’s idea. I’m just wondering whether any of the rest of you had ideas that you didn’t tell us about, or perhaps disagreements that you might have felt bad surfacing once the tide was turning toward Kendra’s idea. And I’m not asking so that we pull apart the decision, or even change our minds about working with this idea, but so that perhaps we could add to the decision a couple of little experiments which might be derivations of her idea or might even head off in a different

68

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

direction altogether. See, I think we have so often let our disagreement tie us up in knots that we haven’t learned how to use it to enlarge our set of possibilities.” “But you looked so happy yesterday!” Marcus said. “Yeah, and Kendra hasn’t looked so happy in ages as she did when we went with her idea,” Kelly added. “That’s the thing,” Mark said, nodding. “I think we have confused agreement with liking people or making them feel good, and I know I’ve been confusing disagreement with stuff that I need to fix or make go away. I guess my question now is about whether we can find a way to have our ­different ideas and still make fast decisions without necessarily piling on in agreement with each other? Wouldn’t it be cool if we believed that disagreement would actually help us find a bunch of good options? I think that sounds better than pitting ideas (and maybe people) against each other and trying to get one or the other to win. Are you willing to just give it a go?”

K E YS TO U N LO C K O U R S I M P L E AG R E E M E N T

I love agreement, myself. I’ve never been a fan of conflict. Yet I’ve seen through the years the way that my desire for agreement and dislike of conflict gets me (unhelpful) compromise solutions when dealing with complex situations— or worse, gets me totally stuck when I polarize. While I understand how vital it has been, evolutionarily, for us to find ways to figure out who was with us and who was against us, that has now become a trap we have to escape.

T R A P P E D B Y AG R E E M E N T

69

The keys to unlocking this mindtrap are to remake what agreement means, what conflict means. I’m not talking about the way some organizations ask you to remake your connection to your ideas so that when your precious proposal is shredded by the group, you will buck up and take it well. I’m not talking about developing a tougher skin or carelessly telling people what we really think. I’m suggesting that we could understand conflict (carefully handled) as a way to deepen our relationships with one another, and disagreements (carefully handled) as a way to broaden our solution set. Key questio n: Cou ld thi s con fli ct serve to d eepen a re lati on shi p?

One of the most helpful questions I’ve ever heard in the conflict space comes from executive coach Catherine Fitzgerald.8 Her question for helping clients deal with conflict was not about whether the client would win the conflict or whether the conflict itself was worthy; it was about the effect on the relationship. And it wasn’t about ruining the relationship (like, “Are you willing to risk the relationship on this conflict?”). It was about deepening it. “Confront only to deepen,” she used to say. Or, Could this conflict serve to deepen your relationship? This idea is revolutionary to me and others like me who struggle with their deep thirst for agreement. It is a challenge to make conflict about resolution rather than winning. Resolution is about understanding one another

70

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

more deeply so that you can come to a third way together, a way neither of you had considered before. A conflict that you truly want to resolve is a force for good in relationships. If we are going to have conflicts that serve to make things better, though, we will have to change our approach. We’ll have to “listen to learn” to fully understand the other person’s perspective. And we’ll have to offer our perspective cleanly and without judgment. We’ll have to really hold on to the idea that other people can disagree with us and still be right. And we’ll have to wade straight into the storm instead of dodging around it or pretending that it doesn’t exist. Take Jamal, who was really struggling with a member of his team. Matthew was not delivering on his promises and used a lot of the executive team time to air his set of grievances about how Jamal and others had treated him. Jamal really liked Matthew and didn’t want to hurt him, but eventually he realized that his efforts to just be agreeable with Matthew were getting in the way. Jamal knew that he needed to have the courage to be straight with Matthew. They had a conversation where Jamal explicitly announced that he would be attempting to deepen their relationship and that he was going to do that through surfacing the conflict he knew was underneath the surface: that he had complaints about Matthew and that Matthew had complaints about him. And then Jamal tried to offer his complaints—as free of judgment as possible—by saying what he had seen Matthew do and how he felt about

T R A P P E D B Y AG R E E M E N T

71

it. When Jamal asked Matthew to do the same back, he listened deeply to understand not only what Matthew was upset about, but also why he was upset, why these things mattered so much to him. With their concerns on the table and with both of them listening, they came to the conclusion that the job Jamal needed Matthew to do was simply not the job Matthew wanted to do anymore. Matthew decided he would leave the organization, and Jamal put his full effort into finding Matthew a job that he would love. Their capacity to air the conflict and listen to one another saved them from what they had both predicted would be twelve months of a kind of passive-aggressive conflict, with Matthew hating his job and Jamal not getting what he needed from a member of his team. Instead, their relationship deepened, with both of them reporting a new trust and admiration for the other, even as they went their separate ways. Key h abi t: Disa gr ee to expa nd

Just as we can engage in conflict in order to deepen our relationships, we can disagree with one another in order to expand our possibilities. In predictable situations, coming up with the right answer is possible—you can research what others have done and just do that. But in unpredictable times, coming up with an answer that has been tried before is not that helpful because who knows how it will go this time.

72

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

Many organizations are wrestling with what to do with the increasing moves to automation and to outsourcing some of their responsibilities to other, less expensive countries. Those in favor of building (or buying) computer systems argue their point, and others in favor of moving call centers or data centers overseas argue their point, each with the other, using piles of data and fancy graphs and charts. Each of these moves has dramatic implications in terms of expense and morale in a business, and senior teams can wrestle with this choice time and again, very often leaving the meetings more entrenched in their previous position. When one of these teams—the executive committee from a professional services firm—began to think about disagreeing to expand, they saw that pushing forward in two or three or five directions simultaneously—in small ways—would be better than putting all their chips on one bet and hoping that one worked. The team decided that instead of trying to figure out which one was the best answer, they’d turn their attention to figuring out what the range of possible answers was, and how to experiment in small ways or in small corners of the business using one approach or another. The team that had been arguing for outsourcing some of their needs could figure out a way to partner with another group in a small project. The group that had been arguing for automation could experiment with automating a small part of the business or giving one team or department (particularly the one that wanted it most) the chance to invest in

T R A P P E D B Y AG R E E M E N T

73

automation in a small way. As they pushed forward to come up with smaller, faster ways to experiment in these various directions, they also realized there were areas they hadn’t been thinking about at all because they had been so polarized. They ended the meeting with three or four small experiments that they could report back on in four months. The point is that in complex, fast-changing situations, we will not ever be able to agree on the one best thing, because that simply doesn’t exist. But we also don’t want to polarize around conflict and become ever more entrenched in our original perspectives. Instead, we need to work to remember that complex situations have so many pieces and perspectives that each one of us might see a slightly different set of possibilities. And even those with bewilderingly different (and seemingly wrong) perspectives are giving voice to something in the complex system that we probably need to pay attention to. Only in this way can we escape from the trap of simple agreement and use the conflict and disagreement as a way to deepen our relationships and expand our possibilities.

5  T R A P P E D B Y C O N T R O L

Trying to take charge strips you of influence

It wasn’t funny in the moment, but happily it was funny the next day when Alison met up with Leroy and Mark for their now-weekly session. Alison was early; Mark was late, as usual, so when he walked in, she was explaining to Leroy the scene at dinner the night before. “So Naomi says, ‘Mommy, can you please put your phone away at the table and be present for the family?’ in an uncanny copy of the voice I use when I ask Mark that question at least twice every dinnertime. I tell her I have to get this one thing out before the Asian markets close, and when I go to look at her apologetically, my thumb brushes the wrong space and I hear the sound of the message sending—and it is a delicate message that should definitely not be sent before its time! “At that moment, Tate, who had been rocking back and forth in his chair, suddenly rocks too hard and falls over. In his mad clutch to save himself, he grabs the ‘Fifty Fun Facts about Ancient Greece’ placemat and takes that with him. ‘I’m okay!’ he calls from the floor, his spaghetti bolognaise 74

TRAPPED BY CONTROL

75

draped over him like a modern art installation. Mark and Naomi burst out laughing, and Tate begins to ham it up, slurping the spaghetti that his tongue can reach, eating it right off his chest, which of course makes the other two hysterical. And truly, if it had been on YouTube it would have gotten a million hits by morning.” Alison laughed recounting it. “But me,” she said, suddenly serious, “I was so freaked out and overwhelmed I just yelled at everyone—at Naomi for telling me to put my phone away, at Tate for rocking, at Mark for not cleaning it up. There was no harm done, but the whole thing felt so overwhelming and horrible that I could hardly stand to stay at the table!” Leroy smiled. “I’m trying to imagine yet another stain on that poor carpet. Tragic!” “What’s really tragic is that I seem totally out of control at home as well as at work! I’m sorry I missed the last session with you guys. I was just too busy to be able to squeeze out the time. Did you have any pointers for getting my complex and out-of-control life back in control?” “Ha! Gotcha!” Mark said. “Last time you all were laughing at me because I hit my team with the old listen-to-learn one-two punch. But my beloved wife is just as bad with wanting to get everything under control—from the flying spaghetti at the table to the immovable partners at the firm!” “Gotcha?” Alison asked, confused. “Control is one of the mindtraps!” Mark told her delightedly. “You’re falling into it all over the place—at home and at work. That’s a real problem in complexity, you know, because

76

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

you cannot make things happen in complex situations—you have to do, er, something else.” “Hmm. Do something else? Other than make things happen? How does one explain that to one’s board? ‘Sorry, I wasn’t able to make things happen in complexity so I just did something else!’ Is that the new wisdom of the day?” Leroy smiled at them both. “Perhaps I should take control here,” he said.

T H E S E D U C T I O N A N D DA N G E R O F C O N T RO L

Jonathan was meeting with a coach about the overwhelming complexity of his work. As he talked about wanting to learn about complexity, he told his coach that he knew he needed to let go of control, but that maybe the coach could help him learn how to have control in letting go of control. “I want to let go of whatever control I absolutely have to, but still be in enough control of the important stuff to sleep through the night.” This is what we all want, right? We know that it’s the right thing to say that we need to let go of control, but could we please, please just let go of the control that we don’t mind giving up, and keep control over those things that seem really central and important to us? Um, no, we can’t. Control is one of the mindtraps because, like the others, it leads us in exactly the wrong direction in complex and fast-moving times. Of course, in a predictable world it’s important for leaders to be able to control their work

TRAPPED BY CONTROL

77

as well as they can. Imagine a manager in a hotel saying to a guest trying to check in: “I am so sorry, Madame, that you made your booking and now I can’t find it! It is an unpredictable world, you know, so there’s simply no way to control this! Sometimes the guests can check in and we can give them their rooms, and sometimes even though they have made a booking, we cannot find it or cannot give them their rooms after all. It is such a shame, but in this fast-moving and complex world what is a manager to do?” In this predictable sort of problem, what the manager should do is tighten the systems so that this error never happens again. In unpredictable arenas, however, trying to control everything is futile. And unfortunately, it isn’t that we can hold on to control for the really important things and release control for the unimportant things; it is often the most important things in our lives that are the most impossible to control. Take parenting, for example, one of the most complex endeavors any of us is likely to ever be involved in. It would be fabulous if we could give up control of the less important things, like whether our kids brush their teeth for exactly three minutes as dentists recommend, in exchange for controlling the more important things, like whom they hang out with at lunch and whether they smoke pot behind the toolshed after school. And of course some parents try to control as much as possible in their children’s lives, mandating their social groups and even giving them drug tests. This, like so much controlling

78

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

behavior in complex situations, often has perverse and unpleasant unexpected consequences when the children of these parents lie to them more often as they squirm their way out of that strong grasp. Leadership is much the same way. The hotel manager can in fact learn to manage most things about the checkin process, which is mostly predictable. But she cannot control whether a Twitter-famous guest, furious about a fight with his girlfriend, takes to social media to unfairly savage the hotel where the fight took place, thus damaging the hotel’s reputation. In complex and emergent outcomes like reputation, we often futilely wish to keep our hands on as many factors as we can so as to be able to dictate the outcome. Unfortunately, our trying to control those factors (“Smile harder at the guests!”) might make things worse (“Hey Mom, why do all the hotel workers have that creepy smile?”). There’s a way we know this already. We know that holding too tightly when we cannot be in control actually makes things worse. And yet our bodies are wired to encourage our desire for control. In fact, our happiness itself is connected to being in control of our lives.1 Our desire for control is unlikely to ever change, but we can shape how we make sense of what it means to have control in the first place. We also don’t notice the ways we swap a minor (and sometimes really unhelpful) proxy for the major but uncontrollable outcome we want. Finally, our reflex is to blame people when things look out of control, or when the outcome was not what we wished

TRAPPED BY CONTROL

79

for. All of these controlling mindtraps ironically decrease our ability to shape things in a complex and unpredictable world. We bel i ev e tha t be in g i n co ntr ol i s criti ca l to o ur su ccess a nd h appin ess

We are right when we believe we are more happy being in control than out of control. Our own belief that we have power to control the circumstances of our lives, sometimes called “self-efficacy,” has been widely linked to happiness. Stanford professor Albert Bandura, who has made much of his life’s work the study of our connection with control, writes, “The capacity to exercise control over the nature and quality of one’s life is the essence of humanness.”2 Like so many of the mindtraps, however, we have a simple story about what that means. We often think it should mean that we can have direct control over all the outcomes that are important to us—we should be able to control when we meet our future partner, when we have our children, how our career unfolds, and so on. And as leaders, we believe we should be able to control the culture, or the focus on customers, or the quality of the safety culture. These are all emergent outcomes of a complex system, though, and our belief that we can control them leads to perverse consequences. Perhaps one of the most perverse consequences is that in the quest for the control that will make us happy, we become unhappy because we are questing for the wrong

80

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

sort of control. Having a more nuanced set of ideas about which things we can control, and how, helps us create a more robust kind of happiness that has less blame and more effectiveness at creating the conditions we most want, while learning to shape our own responses—even when the world gives us conditions we hate. Whe n we can ’ t con trol bi g th in gs, we substi tu te smal l er on es

Our brains are fantastic at the bait and switch, as we have seen so far. Think you’re considering all the facts? Probably you’ve got a simple story. Think you’re really considering the emerging facts about something you’ve been certain about? Probably you’re falling into the mindtrap of rightness. Think you’re really looking to control a whole complex system? Probably you’re paying attention to what can be measured in that system and using that as a proxy for the whole issue. Readers of my previous books will see that I tend to be profoundly opposed to targets in a complex world. Our desire to control uncontrollable outcomes often leads us toward perverse and unhelpful moves as we substitute one element that can be measured for the larger thing we care about that can’t be measured. Here the trap is that we get seduced into controlling that piece of the system that seems to us to be controllable. We see that patients aren’t getting good enough care in hospitals, so we create a target for the time from entrance to admission, treat-

TRAPPED BY CONTROL

81

ment, or discharge. We see that the roads are dangerous after a particularly violent winter, so we create a target for how quickly the potholes get fixed. The problem with these things is that people begin to solve for the small proxy rather than the larger goal. They take shortcuts on patient care to get folks through on time; they fix potholes quickly and temporarily so that they can meet their targets. As they meet their targets, they organize away from the larger goals and toward these smaller ones.3 We do this in small ways too. We believe that we can control our path to happiness by buying a particular car or apartment. We believe we can control our kids’ success if they maintain a particular grade point average. Think back to the last time you wanted a complex goal—like success or happiness or well-being. Now see if you substituted a smaller target as a proxy. Did you think about a promotion? A new house, partner, or holiday? Losing fifteen pounds, or giving up bread and butter? We focus on these small targets of success and lose the larger perspective of what we really want in our work and our lives. If thin gs seem ou t of co ntr ol , we bl ame ou rsel ves o r o the rs

“I remember the day when I came to the startling realization that managers have significantly less control than I had always thought they did throughout my entire career,” Tamara recounted. “It was about the second month of my career as a manager. I had sauntered in, expected that I

82

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

could fix all the pieces that had seemed broken for so long, and finally take charge! But once I tried to put my hands on the things I wanted to change, they just slipped away. And where I thought people would relish someone really making things happen, it turned out that my efforts just made everyone mad at me for a different reason!” These stories are so common: the belief that the person a rung or two above you on the organizational ladder has the control you lack. Most of us feel like we don’t have enough control over those things that are important to us, so we figure that we’re either doing it wrong or that someone else has the real power around here.4 It’s funny, but sometimes the more senior a person’s leadership position is, the less likely she is to feel in control. New CEOs are often the most surprised by this. They have been waiting all their careers to have the ultimate control, and they discover, often much to their shock, that they feel less in control than they did in other positions. It’s almost as if when we get to the top there is nowhere we can look for someone more powerful who can actually control the thing. These CEOs finally have to stop believing in the myth that someone, somewhere is fully in charge and begin to believe in the myriad forces that combine to create the future. Most of us, though, don’t ever climb to the CEO’s corner office and have that vantage point. We fall into the trap of blaming people for outcomes that we couldn’t logically expect them to have much direct control over, if we thought hard enough. CEOs are often held accountable

TRAPPED BY CONTROL

83

for profits; parents are held accountable (by society) for whether their kids turn out well; and movie stars are held responsible for whether their movies are majestic or mocked. But while each of these people has influence over the outcomes we seek, none of them can control those outcomes. Sure, the star of the film has a lot to do with some of what makes a movie great, but hundreds of people are involved in making a film whom she has little to do with, and there is the market the movie is released into and the power of the earliest reviews that sway our minds, things which are totally out of anyone’s hands. There are simply too many intersecting factors to believe that the force of a single person, no matter how effective, can control it all. Alison sat down in James’s office as he looked at her, puzzled. “To what do I owe this honor?” he asked. She smiled at his formality. Even after their productive lunch (once she had started listening), she still stumbled into thinking of him as a dinosaur when she wasn’t paying attention. She’d have to fix that. “James, I’ve been thinking about our lunch a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been really focused on your frustration that so much of this change seems to be out of your control.” “Can I be frank, Alison?” James asked, seriously. “Please.” “You younger people seem to believe that there’s nothing innovative about those of us who have been in this business a long time. I know you must think of us as dinosaurs and you are waiting for us to retire.” Alison hoped

84

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

her face wasn’t flushing in response to James’s accurate assessment. “But actually, I love this place, and I really believe in bringing it into this modern age. I loved your irRational software and what it enabled, and I’m enjoying the conversations I’m having with my clients, which are different—and more personal—than the conversations I used to have.” “So that sounds great!” Alison said. “What’s the problem?” “A couple of problems. First of all, you’ve given us this target for how many clients we’re supposed to be having these conversations with, and that target is just not achievable. I am converting clients over, but slowly, and no way can I just barge in and change everything about our relationship in the time you’ve suggested—it would frighten and confuse our clients unnecessarily. We have to put their needs first, don’t you think?” “Hmm, okay, I can see what you mean, I guess,” Alison said. “Although I would really want to see some progress and I don’t know how else to track it.” “I can give you progress, and I can promise I’m committed and moving as fast as I can, but these targets are a bad idea,” James said. “Okay. No targets but meaningful progress. Got it. Next?” “I actually know quite a few things about how to shift these conversations over time that might be helpful to the others. They’re little shifts—where we hold our meetings, what time of day seems most helpful for these first conversations, etc.—but they might be important. But you’d have to give up on your Gantt charts and your desire to script the

TRAPPED BY CONTROL

85

moves we’re making, and I can’t guarantee they’d work for everyone.” “You know what, James? I feel like there’s quite a lot of control I’m going to have to give up in order to make this change successful. And guarantees of success are the first thing I have to give up. Let’s start with what you’ve been learning.”

K E YS TO U N LO C K O U R N E E D F O R C O N T R O L

Often people hear about complexity and throw their hands up: if nothing can be controlled, how do we ever get anything done in the first place? And it is true that in a complex world basically none of the things that matter most to you are inside your direct control. No matter how much you practice violin, you might never play in the symphony orchestra. No matter how much you work to get your team members to collaborate, they might just stay in their cubicles. No matter how much you take care of your body, you might get cancer anyway. All of these are emergent properties of the system and can’t be under your—or anyone else’s—direct control. This doesn’t mean that you should put away your violin, give up on teamwork, and eat cookie-dough ice cream for dinner. Instead of craving control, in complexity we have to shift to thinking about influence. We will not be able to make things happen, but we can be thoughtful about how we support the emergence of the things we want. Want to raise a child that can support herself as an adult?

86

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

You can influence some of her early experiences to make that outcome more likely. And because we cannot predict the future, we have to be careful not to have too narrow an outcome in mind. When you think about raising a child who can support herself, if the outcome you have in mind is that she will take over the family dry-cleaning business, you’re probably going to push too hard for a narrow destination and might possibly get the sort of perverse consequences from pushing toward too narrow a goal in a complex time. She might be a failure in the skills the dry-cleaning business requires but spectacular in abstract geometry. Instead of setting her up to succeed, you have set her up to fail. One of the quirks of control in a complex world is that a direction (like “more self-sustaining”) is way better than a narrow destination or target (“take over dry cleaners”). Increasing options while knowing what’s most important gives us more room for influence even as it relinquishes our (false) sense of control over exactly how it will all turn out. Key questi on : Wha t can I h el p e nable? Wha t coul d e nable me?

One of the most helpful ways to shift away from thinking about outcomes to thinking about influence is to consider what seems to enable the direction you most desire. Thinking about enablers helps us resist thinking about causes—which is what our controlling minds want

TRAPPED BY CONTROL

87

us to believe in. What caused her stroke? What caused young Johnny to drop out of high school and join a gang? What caused their team’s failure to meet that deadline? All of these are tempting but unhelpful questions, particularly if you’re using them to try to manage your health, your kids, and your team. Asking what you can help enable shifts your thinking and expands your view. What sorts of things are inside your control that might enable your team to work together more collaboratively? Well, you might be able to influence where they sit when they do their work— Google famously creates communal eating spaces for people to bump into one another and talk. You might be able to influence how well people know each other by creating time and space for people to talk about personal things. Or if you’re not the leader of the group and perhaps you can’t influence those things directly, you can use your own behavior to try to make a difference—by asking your colleagues out to lunch, or by moving your desk near people you’d like to collaborate with, or by gently asking people questions about their personal lives and volunteering information about your own. Showing pictures of your kids might not feel like it’s “controlling” the quality of teamwork, but with the right mind-set it might be attempting to enable it (unless you are just wanting to show off your kids, which might have perverse consequences on the quality of teamwork). You can also direct this question to yourself. What would enable you to have the life you most want? You

88

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

might have an image of a particular destination in mind (“I just want to live in one of those beautiful houses on the river”). You can notice the craving for a destination that you think you should be able to control, and see if you can create a direction instead (“I want to spend more of my time surrounded by nature”). Then you can ask questions about what might enable that for you. Take Ayesha, who wanted a leadership position in the small nonprofit in which she was working. She had a particular role in mind and wanted to take up the position in the next six to nine months; she wanted, that is, to control the outcome of her unpredictable career path. Ayesha loved the organization and its mission, but there were very few leadership positions in existence in the first place—and none looked likely to open up soon. As she began to think about enabling a direction rather than creating a single outcome, she realized she wanted a sense of career progression and she wanted to enact more influence over the direction of the organization. Ayesha mused about what might support this, and she decided that simply taking part in the strategic conversations about the future of the organization would be helpful. She explained her direction to her boss and requested to be included in some of those conversations. Nine months later, Ayesha was still in the same position in the organization, but she was far more satisfied with her work and understood much more about what mattered to her as a young leader. And as so often happens, the system was changing around her. Her boss was so pleased with the quality of Ayesha’s

TRAPPED BY CONTROL

89

strategic thinking that he was working on creating a new leadership position, tailored just for her. Our desire to be in control means we tend to search out the solution that creates the outcome we want. Ayesha wouldn’t have thought to create the outcome of her own specially created leadership position—that all looked impossible in her flat organization with its tight resources. Instead, if her eyes had been more focused on a particular leadership position, she might have become more political or tried to find a way to subtly suggest that she was a better candidate than either the incumbent or her colleagues. This might have had a devastating impact on Ayesha and on her prospects at the organization she loved. Key h abi t: Exper imentati on at the edg es

There is a lot of writing these days about being more experimental so that we can innovate our way to a better product, service, mate, future. Let’s face it, though, many of our “experiments” are kind of like the ones we did in high school science. We believe that we can tell beforehand just what’s going to happen, and if we don’t achieve that outcome we figure we did it wrong. When we open our horizons to direction rather than destination, and to influence rather than control, we can begin to think about genuinely experimenting—trying something where we really don’t know what might happen next to see if it helps us travel in the direction we seek. We also want to experiment at the edges rather than at the very

90

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

center of the issue. In complex systems the center is the most resistant to change, so it’s best to stay away from it. Gerhard was wanting to take a more systemic approach to managing his team. He had noticed that he was always the center of the wheel and that individual team members came to him with their issues. While he liked problemsolving with them, he was finding it was taking more and more of his day and he needed them to be working more with one another. At first he thought about creating teambased goals, but he quickly realized that that solution was at the heart of the problem and would likely get a lot of resistance from his team—they didn’t know one another well enough to even know how they could collaborate. So he looked for a smaller experiment that was at the edges rather than the center. He decided he would take five minutes at the beginning of each week to note down some aspect of the interconnections between his team members that he might look for. One week it was “common connections outside our team”; another week it was “similar problems with customers.” Then he put that on a Post-it on his laptop, and as people came in to meet with him, he was tuned to look for that particular issue. He figured in this way at least he’d learn more about the interconnections, even if his team didn’t. Some weeks he didn’t find much. But other weeks the issues popped out with massive connections, which excited him. In the past, Gerhard’s attention would have been more focused on actual solutions, and when a team member came with a similar problem he

TRAPPED BY CONTROL

91

would have provided the solution again and perhaps forgotten who else was wrestling with this issue. With this experiment, he was tuned to think about the connections and he often forgot the solution itself. This meant he had to direct his team members to one another around those issues. “Romi found a fabulous solution to that problem,” he’d tell another team member. “You might go see what she did.” In two months, his tiny experiment (five minutes and a Post-it!) had worked very differently than he had expected. Yes, he had learned more about the team interconnections, but that was only a small part of the outcome. The much bigger outcome was that his team was actually collaborating more, and not going to him with their problems so much. Basically, Gerhard was doing what Peter Coleman, who uses complexity ideas to make progress on intractable conflicts, urges us to do: “Alter patterns, not outcomes.”5 We need to notice the patterns that are creating the circumstances we dislike and then experiment at the edges to change those patterns (and of course we can notice patterns we do like and experiment to amplify those patterns). Then we will find ourselves learning about the system and also influencing it in ways that might just move us in directions that turn out to be better than the destinations we had in mind in the first place.

6  T R A P P E D B Y E G O

Shackled to who you are now, you can’t reach for who you’ll be next

“Okay, how about this one?” Mark turned around from the counter, a knife with almond butter poised in the air. “Nah, too sexy.” “Urgh,” Alison let out a sigh of dismay, “you said the last one was too corporate!” “Do you want me to be honest, or do you want me to just tell you what you want to hear?” Mark asked, turning back to the task at hand and cutting an almond butter sandwich into triangles for Naomi’s lunch box. “I wish I didn’t have to choose—I wish you could be honest and tell me I looked perfect!” Alison said, unbuttoning the third blouse she had tried on that morning. “I just want to get this right. I haven’t ever had a presentation that was this high-stakes before.” “Yes, you have,” Mark told her (listening to win). “Remember when you were first starting NumberSense and you had that meeting with the venture capital guys? Your whole future was in the balance then too.” 92

TRAPPED BY EGO

93

“Geez, thanks for pointing that out,” Alison sneered. “Now my morning will be better for sure.” “What’s the big deal about your outfit?” Mark muttered. “Wear what you wore then.” “I was twenty-six, Mark! I don’t even own those clothes anymore. I might never have owned those clothes, in fact. I think I borrowed them from Kathrin.” Alison stomped back to the closet to see if she could find anything that might inspire confidence from her board. “Nope, nope, nope,” she muttered to her clothes. “Too fanciful, too casual, too flirty.” She knew this was stupid but she was so frustrated she might cry. How would she get them to take her ideas seriously if she couldn’t even dress herself? “Hey, Babe, how about if I try one more time to really listen to you?” Mark had come into their bedroom, his apron still on. “The lunches are made, the kids are glued to PBS Kids, and we are miraculously twenty-five minutes ahead of schedule because of daylight savings time.” Alison sat down on the floor in her closet. “I can’t see how listening is going to help. I wish you could just supply the perfect outfit now.” “It sounds to me like you’re feeling really anxious about today, and like you’re worried that if you don’t look the part, the board won’t listen to you and you won’t be able to make the pivot you want. That’s putting a lot of pressure on you—and on this one meeting, eh?” Alison came and sat next to him on the bed. “Yes, exactly. It’s that I’ve been pushing so hard for the massive org change—that’s what they hired me to do. And I see now

94

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

that running a whole suite of experiments is probably better, but it sounds so loosey-goosey. They want me to make a big splash, and these all sound so little. I want to at least look sure of myself since I can’t actually be sure of myself.” “You’re feeling worried that they won’t take these ideas seriously? Like they’ll think you’ve lost your nerve and they’ll lose their confidence in you?” Alison smiled. “Sometimes I could just kiss Leroy for the change he’s made in you! In us, I guess. And yes, that’s exactly what I’m worried about.” “Hey! Lips off the best friend!” Mark laughed. Then he paused. “Can I tell you what I think, honestly?” Alison’s face crumpled in anticipation. “Okay.” “I think this is the time to be you, Ali. I think this is not the time to put on exactly the right armor and dazzle them. I think it’s time to share with the board what you’re learning and how it’s reshaping the way you’re thinking about this change. And I think you should wear the thing that you feel most comfortable in, most like you.” Now Alison’s eyes were wide with surprise. “You’re kidding. Go in jeans and let them know that I was misguided in my slash-and-burn approach, which they supported, and that now I want to try something else?” “Yep. These guys love you—you know that. They believe in you. You already have their confidence. Now just be human with them, and maybe they’ll be human with you.” “You say that as though it were easy, Mark! But really, it’s so much harder to just walk in and be real with them.”

TRAPPED BY EGO

95

“No one would confuse easy with right, though. Seems like we might try to believe what Leroy is always telling us: in a complex world, what makes us human can be an asset rather than a liability, if we only know which things to trust and which things to mistrust. And you know that our desire to be polished and perfect is one thing to mistrust.” Alison stood up and walked back into the closet. She pulled on pants that were even softer than her jeans (but nicer looking) and a silky knit top that she had gotten at a secondhand shop years ago. They were a little worn, but they were professional and comfortable and very, very Alison. She tossed aside the heels she had been trying on and slipped on the flats that were so comfy she could nearly walk a marathon in them. “Okay, world,” she said to the serious face in the mirror, “here’s my experiment for today. No armor, all Alison.”

T H E S E D U C T I O N A N D DA N G E R O F E G O

One of the most interesting of the mindtraps is the way we are trapped by our egos—by ourselves, really. It turns out that the strongest trap is created by the person we are wanting to seem to be to ourselves and to others. We have each cultivated a particular way of being that works for us. We have changed enormously through our lives to grow into this person we are right now. Now we have arrived somewhere and we invest a surprising (and unseen) amount of our energy showing that person to the world and defending her from harm.

96

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

Of course, we don’t do that consciously. Alison isn’t thinking, “I need to protect and defend my fragile ego.” She’s thinking, “I need to give those board members confidence in my ideas.” Part of our protection mechanism is the justification we use to believe that we’re doing it right in the first place. In one of the classic mismatches of our human system, our relationship to our own vulnerability is totally different to our re­lationship to the vulnerability of others. Sometimes in a workshop or a meeting, a leader will admit to something particularly threatening to his sense of identity. After the leader has admitted this thing that feels so icky to him, he feels terrible about himself. He’ll admit, “Now I feel ashamed, embarrassed, afraid that all of you will have lost your respect for me.” Others watching, though, have an opposite reaction. They say things like, “Now I’m more admiring, astonished at his courage, wanting to reach out to him, feeling better about myself since I see a piece of my shame in him and I admire him so much.” This is the core paradox: we are ashamed of our humanity; others are drawn to us because of it.1 In this chapter, we’re going to look into the trap that’s in the mirror and unpack the way that person is holding us back. We’ll explore our belief that we have changed in the past but now we have arrived and won’t change much in the future. We’ll notice the way holding on to our current self makes us turn away from learning and possibility, and we’ll look at a map of our own growth and development that might open up a new way forward.

TRAPPED BY EGO

97

We bel i ev e we h ave chan ge d mu ch i n the past but won ’t ch ang e i n th e f u tu re

We humans have the strangest experience of our own growth and development. We tend to have a stark differentiation between the growing, evolving person we were earlier in our lives and the grown, evolved person we are now. You see this in kids who resist the (obnoxious, patronizing) idea parents have that perhaps the choices you make at sixteen won’t really be the ones your twentysix-year-old self will feel grateful for. But the surprise from all kinds of research is that we keep that same perspective throughout our lives. Ask a twenty-year-old whether he’ll change over the next decade the way he has changed over the previous one and he’ll tell you, No way! Twenty to thirty is smooth sailing! But ask a thirtyyear-old that question and he’ll tell you he changed enormously over the decade from twenty to thirty. Now it’s over though: thirty to forty looks like just trying to maintain his weight and not lose too much hair. What does a forty-year-old say? You got it—the decade behind him from thirty to forty was full of changes but looking ahead from forty to fifty looks like it’ll be much more settled. And so on. This is true for all of us, at all ages. We know that we’ve changed so much in the past, but—phew— now we have actually settled down and won’t change anymore. And, er, we’re always wrong about that.2 Jamie Holmes tells us: “We create a sharp division between our present, fixed self, and our past, evolving selves. We always think we’ve settled into ourselves, and

98

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

we’re always wrong. The most interesting finding is that at every age, we feel like we’re done with our own evolution.”3 I think it’s really important to notice that we’re wired to (wrongly) believe that our big changes are behind us. Because so many of us don’t think of ourselves as growing and changing into the future, we invest our energy into protecting the person we have become rather than growing into the person we might become next. We prote ct an d de fend the id entity we have rather than open to ne w po ssibili ti es

Protecting the person we have become turns out to be a nearly full-time job. An enormous amount of hidden energy goes into protecting ourselves from evidence that our beliefs are wrong, that we are needing to show our worth, to receive love from others, or to prove that we’re the smartest ones in the room. Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey write about this phenomenon: “In an ordinary organization, most people are doing a second job no one is paying them for. In businesses large and small; in government agencies, schools, and hospitals; in for-profits and non-profits, and in any country in the world, most people are spending time and energy covering up their weaknesses, managing other people’s impressions of them, showing themselves to their best advantage, playing politics, hiding their inadequacies, hiding their uncertainties, hiding their limitations. Hiding.”4

TRAPPED BY EGO

99

And a part of the trick is that we hide this effort from ourselves, too. We’re mostly not aware when we’re protecting and defending our ego. Instead, we tend to think we’re “standing up for ourselves” or “doing what it takes” or any other self-justification technique we might offer. We might notice it with the sweating of our palms when someone challenges us about something we feel we should have prepared for. Then we might blame the other person (“That guy was a jerk for embarrassing me in public this morning!”), or we might turn our wrath on ourselves (“Geez, I’m such a screw-up! I never prepare as I should!”). We might notice it when we have an argument over something really stupid and meaningless (“You never throw away the moldy leftovers! You expect me to be your servant!”) that we somehow can’t stop ourselves from escalating (“And that’s how I know you’re the wrong person for me to spend the rest of my life with!”). We might notice it when we, like Alison, rely on our clothes or our car or our house to carry the impression we most want to make (“We can’t drive up to the meeting in that car—the investors will know we’re struggling to make it and won’t think we’re a good risk”). Really, though, what we are often doing is fighting against our weaknesses, our unknowing, our confusion, our shame. The energy that fight takes is enormous. Kegan and Lahey call it the “single biggest loss of resources that organizations suffer every day.” And even worse, as we win that fight, we lose sight of the developmental path that is just on the edge of our defences.

100

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

We don’t h ave a se nse of the patterns of our life

The problem is, we tend not to have a sense of the way the elements of our lives shape into a beautiful and helpful pattern. In the absence of a map that tells us where we have been and where we might get to next, we figure wherever we are is the last stop on the road and we need to defend the patch of land we happen to inhabit right now. We believe a little polish here or a new skill there will fix what ails us. A middle manager with a “confidence problem” is sent to an image consultant to buy better clothes and learn how to stand up straight. An executive who struggles to be promoted to the most senior positions because of his trouble connecting heartto-heart in his speeches is sent to a voice coach and told to watch movies with strong yet connected male characters. A stay-at-home mother who feels lost when the last of her kids heads off to college is given a gift certificate to a barista class. Each of these treats the symptom of the issue rather than the underlying cause. The symptom is how we show up; the cause might be how we make sense of the world and our place in it. Theories of adult development offer us a new possibility to make sense of who we are and who we are becoming.5 These theories tell us that our time on the planet doesn’t just change our physical shape; it also changes our emotional and mental shape—what I think of as our “forms of mind.” Just as a baby becomes more able to

TRAPPED BY EGO

101

handle the complexities of her life when she learns to walk and talk, and a young child becomes more able to handle the complexities of his life when he learns to read, so too do our new ways of being in the world shape our ability to handle the complexities in our life. Unlike our early changes, though, our adult changes tend not to show up with new skills or a new physical growth spurt. Generally, you can see them most easily when you get really interested not just in what someone knows but in how he makes sense of what he knows. For example, early in our adult lives we rely on outside perspectives to tell us how we are doing—what is right and wrong, what is successful, what is valuable. This outside perspective can come from a set of relationships (with your family, your friends, your colleagues at work or in a religious institution) or from a set of principles or expertise (from your training or your professional experience). In each case, the truth about us tends to come from outside us, from our social surround, which is why we call this the socialized form of mind. This socialized form of mind has been a great help to humans throughout our history. It creates the glue in societies and helps us learn from one another and follow common rules—not because we are forced to but because in our socialized form of mind we internalize those rules as the right way to be. Here people are mostly creating and defending the identity that others give to them; we need to make other people feel good about us to feel good about ourselves. You can see that in a simpler world,

102

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

where there were guides who could tell us what was right or wrong, where professions and sets of expertise stayed fairly constant across a person’s life span, there was little reason to grow beyond this form of mind. And even in the complex world people are faced with today, many people stay with the socialized form of mind for the rest of their lives. Others, though, when faced with the confusing complexity of different opinions and pressures and professions, come to understand the limits of a view that is looking outward. Those people keep the voices they once internalized within a socialized mind, but over years or even decades of development they add a kind of “chief deciding voice” to the crowd—their own voice, that is. We call this the self-authored form of mind because now we do not want to be written by our circumstances; we figure out how to pick up the pen to write our own story. We no longer turn outside ourselves for direction on what’s right and wrong, good and bad, but bring the compass inside as we cobble together our own set of values and beliefs by which to make our own decisions. This doesn’t mean that we no longer care about the opinions of others or of our society or our professions, but when those opinions clash it is not a crisis of self for us; it is a tricky set of decisions to make, but we have the selfauthored form of mind to write those decisions for ourselves. In the self-authored form of mind, the identity we protect and defend is the internal operating system we have

TRAPPED BY EGO

103

assembled for ourselves—our values and systems of belief. This protection might cause us to slip into righteous certainty because we are more oriented to the worth of our own judgments than the ideas and perspectives of others. Eventually, this internal operating system, which was such a gift when we first developed it, can turn into a liability. Ultimately, in an uncertain and complex world, we might find that the effort we put into protecting our beliefs and values is not worth all the calories, and that it prevents our learning and holding multiple perspectives about the world. Our beliefs and values are obviously of key importance, but they don’t play out on an empty stage. They are always shaped by what is asked of us and by what our circumstances require. This is why some people find that the complexity of the world is still too great for this self-authored mind to handle. They see that they are not the sole writers of their lives, as if their lives took place on a blank page. Instead, they see themselves as both the writer and the written. They have some control over their lives, but they do not have total control; they are jazz musicians riffing along with others rather than believing life can be rehearsed and perfected. We call this co-constructed and emergent form of mind the self-transforming form of mind because people with this form of mind are always searching for the next thing that might challenge a deeply held belief system. They spend less time creating and defending a particular version of themselves and more time letting life transform them.

104

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

Knowing that these different mind forms exist (and sensing the many, many steps between each of these phases that incorporate multiple forms of mind simultaneously) can help us make sense of some of our inevitable challenges. Are you aware that you used to rely more on the perspectives of others and are now worried that you’re becoming a little arrogant? That’s likely part of a necessary developmental transition from the socialized to the self-authored form of mind. Notice that you used to feel more certain and now suddenly you see many more shades of gray—even about your own values, which you have held so dear? That’s likely an emerging chapter as you develop from the self-authored to the more selftransforming form of mind. Remembering that we are always on a developmental path helps us walk into the future with more grace. Bill cleared his throat and stacked his papers again, clearly trying to settle himself after Alison’s initial explanation. “I hate to sound difficult, Alison,” he said, “but this seems like a different strategy than we expected, and quite a ­different strategy than we signed on to just a couple of months ago.” It was basically what Alison had expected. She found her chest tightening and her hands sweating, as was usual in these situations, and her whole body urged her to protect herself. She remembered her promise to herself this morning, though, and rubbed her sweaty hands on her soft, comfortable pants.

TRAPPED BY EGO

105

Instead of defending herself and explaining why he was wrong, Alison let down her armor. “You’re totally right, Bill. This really is a new approach. And to be honest, I’m worried about it too. As you know, I’m passionate about creating really big change here at AN&M. I believe that together we can invent the future of accounting services while helping our clients achieve their dreams, and without harming the world. That’s always been my vision.” “That’s our vision too, Alison—that’s why we hired you in the first place. Doesn’t it seem like this is a backing-off of that vision?” “I understand how it looks to you all,” Alison said, addressing the board as a whole. “You hired me to be bold and to really shake things up, and now it looks like I’ve lost my nerve. It’s funny—from my perspective it would have been easier to just plow ahead with the old plan. It’s this change that’s taking me quite a lot of nerve, actually.” “What do you mean?” Bill asked. “Well, I was convinced—as you were—that this massive change needed a wholesale shift in what we do and how we do it. And I believed that the best way to get that shift was to give things a big shake and disrupt things. But as you know, I’ve been talking to all the partners, one by one. Actually— really what I’ve been doing is listening to all the partners, one by one. And I’ve been thinking about the whole system here and not just the endgame where we want to arrive. She took a deep breath to settle herself, and continued. “It turns out there are some incredibly innovative things happening already here; it’s just that there’s no place for

106

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

people to talk about them. Before I barrel in and try to force my own innovation, I want to make space for the innovations that are already emerging to become more infectious.” The board members nodded tentatively. That sounded reasonable. “And I also realized that there were people interested in innovating who were wrestling with small frustrations in our standardized systems that made it hard for them to try a new thing,” Alison explained. “So I thought that I would release some of those constraints for a short time and see what happened then.” The board members nodded again, understanding better what she was talking about. “These ideas weren’t mine, mind you,” Alison added. “They were compilations of ideas that came from some of our newest, most experimental partners as well as some of our oldest and, you might expect, most change-resistant ones. It turns out, they’re not really resistant to change. Everyone at the whole firm knows we need to be different. They’re just resistant to me imposing my view of change on them. They want to have a hand in creating it.” Bill was nodding broadly now. “Okay, so when you said you wanted to pull back from the significant culture-change effort we have been planning to launch, you were meaning so that you could do these smaller experimental shifts?” Alison nodded. Bill continued, “That makes sense to me, but wouldn’t it be better to do both at once? Why forgo the big change for all of these little ones?”

TRAPPED BY EGO

107

Alison smiled. “It’s a bet, for sure. I’m not sure that I’m right. I can only tell you the way I have been thinking about it and hear how you all are thinking about it and see if together we can decide on the best way forward.” “Okay, that’s totally fair,” Bill acknowledged. “Why don’t you walk us through your thought process.”

K E YS TO U N LO C K O U R E G O - P R OT E C T I O N T R A P

If our default is to defend and protect who we have been rather than reaching and growing toward who we could become, what do we do about that? We see the possible pathway of growth, but that doesn’t make it effortless to follow it. Believing that people can change, dramatically, over the course of their lives can be both helpful and daunting. Believing people are more beautiful and connected when they are vulnerable is easy to say and hard to actually act upon. But there are moves you can make and questions you can ask that will help you escape from this trickiest of mindtraps. Key questio n: Wh o do I wan t to be n ext?

One way we get in our own way is believing that an idea or a value or a hope arises out of who we are, and who we have always been. If Alison saw herself as someone who always wore her armor—that’s just who she was—she couldn’t have approached the board meeting in this new way. It would have been too un-Alison to do that.6

108

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

But if Alison has a story about herself that that is who she has been “up until now” and an eye on the person she wants to be next, she will give herself much more room to explore and invent the next version of herself. Whenever a leader tells me, “I’m just not that person who is inspiring at the front of the room,” I hear his footsteps walking away from that possibility. Whenever a college student tells me she has never been good at math, I see a shrug and the solidifying of an old belief system, which no longer serves her. Notice the difference between “I’m just not that person who is inspiring at the front of the room” and “Up until now, I just haven’t been that person who is inspiring at the front of the room.” The first one means you can just go home. The second means that you’re headed toward another possibility and that perhaps someday, in the not-so-distant future, you’ll be that person who is inspiring at the front of the room. Lien had struggled her whole career with issues of selfconfidence, and people were always telling her to believe more in herself or to show up more assertively with her ideas. She tended to reflexively answer, “That’s just not who I am,” which left her feeling demoralized and stuck. When she started saying, “That’s just not who I am yet, but I’m working on it,” even that breath of air was the motion she needed to begin to move more easily in her own skin. Asking ourselves and others to think about who we will be next keeps us from falling into the trap of

TRAPPED BY EGO

109

believing we have arrived, and that keeps us living in a world of possibilities instead of creating and defending the current reality. Key move: Li ste n to learn f rom your self

Now that you are asking yourself about the person you will be­come, the next move is to look at the way you are making sense of the world. This, in many ways, is like “listening to learn” from others, except you’re turning that curiosity onto yourself and getting more curious about how you’re making sense of the world. This isn’t about why you believe what you believe (so you’re not trying to perfect your self-justification); it’s about how you see the world in such a way that your current perspective is the one that arises for you. This helps you find your own place on the developmental map, which has the advantage of both understanding yourself better and also beginning to discover where you might grow next. When you find yourself frustrated and confused—as Alison was, sitting on her closet floor—you can get a little distance from that frustration and wonder what is really going on. Key questions you can ask yourself are • What is at stake for me here? • What is the hardest part about this? • What is the best part about this? • How do I know this is true?

110

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

The trick isn’t to ask the question just once (that tends to get at justification) but to ask it at least three times. For Alison, it might look like this: “Geez—I’m so upset about this outfit. There really must be something else going on. What’s at risk for me?” She might answer herself: “If I don’t look the part, they won’t take me seriously!” Then she needs to ask the question again: “And what would be at risk for me if they didn’t take me seriously?” Just as with listening to learn, we have to be open and curious with ourselves, not critical or trying to teach ourselves a lesson. She might answer herself: “If they didn’t take me seriously, I might not take myself seriously. And if I didn’t take myself seriously, I might lose my nerve and scuttle the whole plan so that I wouldn’t have to go out on a limb all by myself. I guess I’m afraid that I’m really not committed to this plan enough to carry it out without their support.” You get the idea. By asking questions and listening to herself, she can find out what’s really shaping her thinking and she can begin to find her own growth edge— the place that might mark out the territory of the person she’ll be next.7 In this case, it sounds like Alison might be relying too much on the perspectives of others in order to believe things herself. As she wonders who she might be next, she might want to have a little more of that belief system inside her, so that her clothes—and

TRAPPED BY EGO

111

the board—wouldn’t determine how she felt about the change she was making. Knowing about where we are in our developmental map and thinking about who we might become next allows us to release some of the pressure of defending where we are, and encourages us to look with curiosity at the way life is supporting us to grow into the next version of ourselves.

7  B U I L D I N G A L A D D E R T O E S C A P E THE MINDTRAPS

Alison led the last of Mark’s team through the house and on to the back deck as the first bottle of champagne opened with a pop. “What, no Thai food?” Kendra teased. “But veggie burgers in three varieties!” Mark called out from the barbeque. “I’ll do that,” Alison said, taking the apron and tongs from Mark and handing him a glass of champagne. “You go celebrate.” Mark gathered his team together and raised his glass: “To the launch of PurpleChat, our newest—and soon to be most successful—app!” There were smiles and clinking of glasses as they all reveled in their accomplishment. “And to the three different variations of it that are all swimming around in the ether, collecting data for us!” Kelly added, raising her glass again. The several different choices that had emerged as they faced their disagreement in a new

112

BU I L D I N G A L A D D E R TO E S C A P E T H E M I N D T R A P S

113

way had found their way into different test options for customers—and more learning for the team. “Here’s to having dinner most nights with our families instead of you yokels!” Marcus added, his voice tinged with relief. The others smiled broadly and called out congratulations for his new baby, who was due in three weeks. Leroy raised a glass to Mark. “Here’s to your fantastic team engagement scores and the way you have been able to deliver your product launch on time, and without killing you or your team!” They clinked again, and Alison poured more champagne into their rapidly draining flutes. “Seriously, Leroy,” Marcus said. “We could never have done this without you. We were getting lost in our old patterns, working harder and harder but not making much progress. I was honestly worried that this job was actually impossible—or that I was a total failure. And it was really tough on my home life with my wife struggling so much with the pregnancy.” Others nodded their heads. That sense of overwhelm and failure had been palpable on the team. “Here’s to Leroy!” Kendra said, raising her glass again. “Who helped us all escape from the mindtraps and find a new approach so that we could actually get our work done and not feel horrible about ourselves. Now, what’s the next thing we’re supposed to master, O Wise One?” “Master the traps, yes!” Leroy answered in his best Yoda voice. “And build a better ladder.” “A ladder?”

114

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

“Sure. It’s one thing to have a key to escape each trap individually, and that’s what we’ve been practicing. But building a ladder to climb out of the traps more generally is an excellent long-term strategy.” “Here’s to ladders and other DIY tools!” Mark toasted again, perhaps getting more interested in the toasting than the toasts. “That’s a cool idea, Leroy. I’d like to hear more about how to build this ladder,” Kendra said earnestly. “I have been practicing with the various techniques you and Mark have been teaching us, but I still feel like I have a long way to go.” “Of course there’s a long way to go,” Leroy answered her. “This is the whole story of our lives. We’ll never escape the mindtraps altogether, but we can strengthen our connections to our purpose, to ourselves, and to each other in order to gradually live a life with fewer and fewer traps in it.” “I’ll drink to that!” Mark toasted.

BU I L D I N G T H E L A D D E R

Each of the mindtraps has its own particular escape path and each of those paths makes us more complexityfriendly in general as we learn to ask new questions about our lives and our thoughts, listen more deeply to others, and find a way to continually learn from our lives. This book has been about the keys to escape the mindtraps that come up as quirks of our human attachment to simplicity and certainty. As we use these keys, we are unlock-

BU I L D I N G A L A D D E R TO E S C A P E T H E M I N D T R A P S

115

ing new possibilities in the uncertainty and complexity all around us. (You can see a summary of this in Table 1.) Even better, there are a series of generally helpful practices, though, that aren’t specific to any single mindtrap. To really become someone who doesn’t need to rely always on these keys and who can begin to escape the mindtraps without effort, we need to build a ladder that helps us climb out of the mindtraps as a whole and into bigger versions of ourselves. The rungs of this ladder are built of the material that creates what’s biggest and best in us as humans: a connection to our purpose, to our bodies and our emotions, to compassion for ourselves and one another. With all of the modern focus on the science of complexity, on T ab le 1 Summary of the Mindtraps and the Keys to Escape Them Mindtrap

Key Question

Key Habit

Your desire for a simple story blinds you to a real one.

How is this person a hero?

Carry three different stories.

Just because it feels right doesn’t mean it is right.

What do I believe? How could I be wrong?

Listen to learn rather than listening to win or fix.

Looking for agreement robs you of good ideas.

Could this conflict serve to deepen a relationship?

Disagree to expand the solution set rather than agreeing to contract it.

Trying to take control strips you of ­influence.

What can I help enable? What would enable me?

Experiment at the edges.

Who do I want to be next?

Listen to learn from yourself.

Shackled by your ego to who you are now, you can’t reach for who you’ll be next.

116

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

neuroscience, and on the interconnections between our bodies, our minds, and our contexts, perhaps the most helpful tool is one of the oldest: mindfulness. This does not mean we need to sit on a hard floor or chant in Sanskrit. Yet some of the most up-to-date science points us in the direction of some of our most ancient teachings. Each of the elements that follow is a version of mindfulness, and in each of them I offer you a guiding question or practice that is grounded in robust theory and research. I feel passionate that we don’t have to simply fight our human quirks but can find ways to understand ourselves and one another better, and these practices help us do that. But I’m not just offering advice; I’m taking it too. You see, I wrote this book during my second time with cancer—a local recurrence of the breast cancer I had had two years earlier (as Keith and I were finishing Simple Habits for Complex Times1 ). I learned the news from a call with my surgeon thirty minutes before I needed to teach a group of sixty senior leaders how to handle complexity, ambiguity, and change (note to self: don’t ever take a call from an oncologist before you have to perform anything).2 So the world has helped me learn quite a lot about what it means to face complexity and uncertainty and which practices, mind-sets, and ways of being can help us not only get by but thrive in a world that is constantly providing us with the unexpected. In complexity, it is the number and form of the connections in a system that make the difference. In life, it is the number of deep connections to other people that

BU I L D I N G A L A D D E R TO E S C A P E T H E M I N D T R A P S

117

matters to our health and well-being. A few practices about connection will help us build the ladder to climb out of the mindtraps and feel a little less lost in the uncertainty of it all. Connectin g with ou r purpo se

The gift of the mindtraps—the thing they evolved to do in the first place—is to give us a shortcut to make decisions so that we are not swamped by all the complexities around us. The mindtraps are only a problem because each of the shortcuts becomes a trap in an uncertain and complex world. If we’re going to stop falling into these reflexive ways of handling our lives, we need a purposeful replacement. Perhaps the most important rule for escaping the traps while not getting blown off course is to connect to a deep purpose and live toward that. It’s vital to keep exploring until you find that space that is most meaningful to you, and then continue to explore that purpose as it grows and changes while you grow and change. In my work with leaders of all sorts, I am continually surprised at the ways we get so busy with the details that we forget to keep looking for the larger purpose of our lives. Without that larger purpose, we will struggle to find the keel that keeps us steady in the howling winds of change. And, it turns out, without the larger purpose, our lives are not only less meaningful but shorter too. Professors Patrick Hill and Nicholas Turiono reviewed data from more than six thousand people to look at the

118

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

connection between life purpose and longevity. Hill writes, “Greater purpose in life consistently predicted lower mortality risk across the lifespan, showing the same benefit for younger, middle-aged, and older participants across the follow-up period.”3 In their research they found that it didn’t matter whether you actually accomplished your purpose—it was pursuing it that seemed to matter. And no matter at what point you found your purpose, it helped you (though the authors muse that perhaps the earlier you find your purpose, the earlier the benefits might accrue). Discovering your purpose is not like finding the perfect pair of shoes (although that’s no simple feat either). But there are hints that help you look in the right direction. First of all, it’s not about money. While having enough money is important to our happiness, it is a means to an end (and only in limited ways) and not an end in itself.4 Second, the purpose that will help you most is not about your fame or your ego. Those are traps, remember? Third, it’s probably not something you could ever accomplish fully. “Make partner by thirty-one” is a goal. “Create artistic experiences that elevate people from their daily existence and bring them to more joy and compassion” is a purpose. The purpose that is most supportive of our health and happiness is almost always about something bigger than us; it’s about making the world better in some way for your having been here. Find that purpose and live toward it, and one rung in your ladder is solid.

BU I L D I N G A L A D D E R TO E S C A P E T H E M I N D T R A P S

119

Avina was a senior director in a professional services firm with a specialty in US healthcare. She found herself very often trapped by her ego, which had been built on a whole career of rightness and coming up quickly with simple stories that her well-honed pattern recognition could quickly sort and solve. Her purpose, as she held it, was very much imported from her firm: improve operations flow in the high-dollar operating rooms, shorten length-of-stay for hospital visits, and above all cut costs by reducing the number of uninsured people in the emergency room. As her work got more complex, though, right answers became more elusive and her simple stories became unhelpful rather than helpful. At first, she held on tightly to her need to simply improve: to become more right and to have simple stories that were more effective. As she connected more deeply into a higher-order purpose—to fundamentally improve the lives of people who were unwell, not just increasing the length but increasing the quality of their lives—she found she could much more easily let go of her need to be right and her desire to create and tell simple stories. Her ego, which had been built on being socialized into her expertise (“I knew how to help clients make more money”) became looser as she began to self-author this new purpose for herself and for her firm (“How do we use what we know about hospital efficiency and health outcomes to inspire our clients to find creative solutions that improve the lives of hospital workers and patients as well as the bottom line?). She realized that maybe it

120

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

would be okay—or even better for everyone involved— to have complex stories and to ask questions without knowing the answers in advance. So how can you uncover this sort of guiding purpose for yourself? Frederick Buechner says that your purpose, your calling, is “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” It is a necessarily interconnected dance between what calls each of us and what the world calls for. My personal purpose right now is about creating space for humans to connect more often to the love and compassion that I believe is part of the core essence of our humanity. Others might find that purpose too touchy-feely. Their purpose might lie in bringing more public awareness to climate change, in creating more efficient and effective workplaces, or in supporting young people to be the adults the world will need tomorrow. Notice what activities have given you the most energy over the day. Now think of those you would feel most proud of people knowing about, and about how those contribute to the world in some way. Which would you be doing even if you didn’t have to? It is not happenstance that so many people find their purpose after a tragedy or a cancer diagnosis. Coming to terms with our mortality makes each day a little more precious and makes it more urgent for us to do something meaningful with the blink of time we have on the planet. Sometimes it helps to think of how our daily lives would look abstracted onto our memorial plaque or tombstone. You

BU I L D I N G A L A D D E R TO E S C A P E T H E M I N D T R A P S

121

might not want “Devoted to Binge-Watching Only the Finest TV Shows” to be the lasting memory of you, carved into stone. But you also might not want “Worked Tirelessly on Behalf of Owning Her First BMW by 26.” Finding your purpose and living toward it is as much a process of discovery as it is of creation. Create the conditions for that awareness to emerge for you, and then see if it can shape your future. Practice: Each day see if you can find at least one moment where your deep gladness and the world’s hunger meet, and jot down what that might look like on a plaque. Even if these are tiny moments—“Made a child laugh” or “Eased the load for a colleague by helping her solve a problem”—they are the seeds of your purpose. Collect them, and the shape and colors of the evolving garden will bloom. Connectin g to our bod ies

The second rung on the ladder that helps us climb out of the mindtraps is with you all the time, but you probably don’t notice it that much. Our bodies are constantly giving us signals that nearly all of us ignore. We need to be more connected to what they are telling us, because they keep us grounded in what is rather than allowing our minds to trap us with what might or should be. Nabil was trying to show up better in meetings, be less visibly impatient and annoyed. At first his goal was to disguise the feelings he knew were inevitable, but then he

122

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

realized that he was falling into some classic mindtraps that were causing some of those feelings. His desire to control the outcome of a discussion was fighting with his desire for all of his team members to get along with each other. As those two mindtraps battled within him, he became frustrated—not just with the others but, he realized, with himself. Beginning to pay attention to his body left him with new ways to escape those mindtraps altogether. He noticed that the emotion of impatience and annoyance was accompanied by the sensation of a tight chest and racing heart. He recognized those as symptoms of anxiety as much as annoyance and was able to remember why he was anxious. He saw the traps. The mindtrap of control was escalating his fear that the group would not make a decision and that he (as the CEO) would be held responsible for that. The mindtrap of agreement was making him hold his tongue because he didn’t want to cause strife in the group. That led him in uncomfortable circles—no wonder he was so impatient and annoyed! He started to simply name his underlying concerns at the meeting: “Hey, I’m noticing that we’re circling this topic, and it might be that the rest of you are finding we’re progressing, but I’m a little nervous that we’re not getting very far.” And he pushed against his need for harmony by reminding them (and himself ) that productive disagreement might be a help: “I am wondering whether there are things that we aren’t saying that might be getting in the way. It’s important for us to voice our disagreement with one another so that we can expand

BU I L D I N G A L A D D E R TO E S C A P E T H E M I N D T R A P S

123

our thinking and get to the best solution.” Noticing his bodily response, connecting it to his emotional response, and talking about both of them not only helped Nabil resist the annoyance and irritation but helped him lead his team with more honesty and grace. The idea here is simply to connect to your body and begin to treat it as a source of knowledge and support rather than the vehicle that carries you from meeting to meeting and sometimes breaks down annoyingly. What we have learned about the connection between our thinking and our bodies is surprising—and it is often backward. We think that our stomach tightens up because we are nervous or that our lips curve into a smile because we are happy. Actually, as with so many complex systems, there is no clear one-way causal direction here. Sometimes we become nervous because we were hunching over and clenching our stomachs and that motion released cortisol that our brain translated into anxiety; we become happy because we smiled, and the smile made our body release dopamine. Practice: It is amazing, the power of simply noticing and naming our bodily reactions and connecting them to the mindtraps. Sometimes it works for people to just stop and ask themselves: What is my body feeling right now? Is it reacting to any of the traps? Other times people are triggered by a response they’re having (“I just got so angry!”) and that helps them remember to look for physical signs (“What’s going on in my body right now?”). Speaking as someone who has sometimes struggled to

124

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

remember I have a body, this practice has opened up whole worlds of information I never had access to before. For in addition to our creating simple stories outside us, we create simple stories about what’s going on inside us as well. Our bodies are the universal key that unlocks those traps. I still need to make a conscious practice of it, stopping throughout the day to simply do a quick scan of my body and what it’s telling me, but I am more tuned into my body than I ever have been before—and its teachings are more generally available than ever before. Connectin g to our emo ti on s

The third rung on our ladder is our connection to our emotions. Make no mistake—your emotions are guiding you all the time. We humans are emotional beasts, and there’s no way around that power (and really, would we want there to be?). In fact, it’s often our emotions that create the conditions for us to fall into the mindtraps in the first place. The practice here isn’t to try to escape our emotions in any way, but to simply connect to them explicitly rather than being led by them without our noticing. Paying attention to the subtleties of our emotions and watching for whether we have fallen into a mindtrap helps us climb the ladder into a more intentional way of being. There are two pivotal pieces about being connected to our emotions that will help us unlock our own possibilities. The first is naming our emotions with nuance and granularity. As Todd Kashdan and his colleagues found,

BU I L D I N G A L A D D E R TO E S C A P E T H E M I N D T R A P S

125

this turns out to be a skill, and an incredibly important one. People who can name their emotions in nuanced ways (“I’m anxious about this job interview but also excited and energized!”) have surprisingly better outcomes in a wide variety of places than those who lump everything together (“I’m super nervous about this job interview!”). It turns out that people who name emotional nuance are better able to recover from setbacks, can better manage their anxiety and sadness, and generally cope better with the unexpected difficulties of life (even drinking less, and acting out of their anger less).5 Watch how having a simple story about your own emotions creates the trap. We want to have complex stories about both our inner and our outer lives. The second is understanding that the fullness of our emotions is data. A mindfulness practice of some sort allows us to notice emotions, feel for the granularity in them, and then watch our judgment about them, which is probably connected to our need for control. Is anger an emotion to be pushed aside as “negative” or “childish”? Or is it a helpful clue that something important has been violated? Is sadness the millstone that will drag you down? Or is it a doorway toward our connected humanity? There are emotions that are more or less pleasant, but trying not to make sense of emotions as inherently good or bad is awfully helpful in a complex world. Our nervous systems were designed for a much more predictable, slow-moving world. The pace and rate of change will surely activate our nervous systems, telling

126

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

us that there is danger and threat all around us (and flooding our bodies with cortisol, a hormone that is very helpful when running from lions but potentially toxic when we have large doses of it, day after day).6 The more we can see and make sense of our emotions—rather than acting out of them—the more easily we can escape all of the mindtraps of complexity. Vimla had an ego she protected under the guise of a constantly happy person, and she pushed away or denied any hint of sadness, anger, or fear. Whenever one of those less acceptable emotions crept in on her, she tried to control her situation or her reaction (or both), cracking a joke, changing the subject, or if neither of these things worked, simply walking away from the thing that was causing her distress. As a team manager, she was ruthless in maintaining good cheer in her team and she wouldn’t allow anything that seemed like disagreement in their weekly meetings, coaxing and cajoling people into apparent agreement. When a doctor told her that her blood pressure was dangerously high and her body was stressed beyond belief, she sought help for stress and found out that she was trapped by her need for control and agreement. Her counselor taught her to hold negative emotions as a facet of life that was as vital and important—if not as fun—as the positive ones. As she began to see the subtleties of her emotions, she saw that she could still be an optimistic person, but one with more nuance than before. By having a more complex sense of her own emotions, Vimla was increasingly able to handle disagree-

BU I L D I N G A L A D D E R TO E S C A P E T H E M I N D T R A P S

127

ment among her team members, and she was able to be a better friend, a better mother, and a better manager, as she was more present for those around her who were in grief or anger or fear themselves. Practice: As you notice a strong emotion, imagine that it is braided together by many different colors of emotions. See if you can begin to just unpick the braid, laying out the colors alongside one another. Anger over negative feedback might unbraid into shame, indignation, gratitude, and the seeds of connection and change. It will help you deal better with each of your emotions (particularly the darker ones) if you can see all the shades that have created it. Unbraiding these emotions and allowing them to simply be will let you climb out of the simple stories, let go of your need for control, and generally find your way out of the mindtraps. Connectin g with compassi on f or ou rsel ves a nd o the rs

The first three rungs of our ladder connect us to vital parts of ourselves. The fourth rung also connects us to one another. If connecting to our own passion to make the world a better place is supportive of our health and well-being in an increasingly complex world, then compassion—literarily, passion with—is the fabric of our social connection. Each of the mindtraps is a quirk of our human condition that is so deeply wired into our bodies and our

128

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

brains that we will never fully escape. If we hold these quirks as faults in ourselves or others, we’ll be massively frustrated. Frustration and learning don’t go together well and will get in the way of our even noticing that we have fallen into the traps—much less escaping from them. If we see them as a core and often-helpful part of our humanity, we face one another with compassion. This also happens when we look in the mirror. Selfcompassion is a relatively new field of study, but research in the field is beginning to show the vast and varied impact of self-compassion on things we all care deeply about. Our ability to look at our own flaws with forgiveness and kindness is associated with “emotional wellbeing, motivation, health behaviors, personal responsibility, coping, and better interpersonal relationships.”7 Compassion for others helps us connect to them without judgment and with open, curious kindness. Compassion for ourselves does the same thing—only it connects us to ourselves with open, curious kindness. This creates the conditions for us to learn from the mistakes we inevitably make rather than feel shame about them (which is so unhelpful when we are trying to learn). Doug was the CEO of a company that had made a big bet on a piece of technology, and that bet failed in a public and humiliating manner. The teams responsible had treated the world as simple and had fallen into the mindtraps of rightness and simple stories on the way to the launch of what they just knew was the next great advance in their industry. Once the technology failed, they con-

BU I L D I N G A L A D D E R TO E S C A P E T H E M I N D T R A P S

129

tinued to speak from the depths of the traps; they fell into the mindtrap of control, believing that someone else should have been more in control of those things that had gone wrong. The teams that had previously been trapped by agreement suddenly flipped to self-protection and polarization, and their simple stories tended to be about how others should have made different choices that would have inevitably changed the outcome. Blame and shame became the hallmarks of their interactions. Doug realized, “I needed to find a way to help these people find compassion for themselves and for one another, or else in addition to the money we lost when the product flopped, we’d also lose the learning that was available.” Doug talked to members of the team, listened well to them (to learn, not to fix). He noticed the mindtraps they were falling into and gently pointed them out, reminding them all of their humanity and of the difficulty of predicting and controlling in a complex world. Through emphasizing compassion for themselves and others, he helped them replace their simple stories with more complex ones, let go of their need for control, and see that their failure was not an embarrassment but a piece of continually trying to stay at the cutting edge of their field. His compassion helped them climb out of the mindtraps as he supported them to shift their sense of failure from shame to learning, reinvigorating the disengaged team. Each of these connections—to our purpose, to our bodies, to our emotions, and to our compassion for ourselves and others—supports us to climb out of our trap-laden

130

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

T ab le 2 Building the Rungs of the Ladder The Rungs of the Ladder

How to Build Each Rung

Connect to purpose.

Reach beyond your own ego, find moments where your deep gladness and the world’s ­hunger meet, and collect the seeds of your purpose.

Connect to your body.

Notice what’s going on in your body and watch out for any mindtraps that might be shaping your sensations.

Connect to your emotions.

Try to name the different strands of the braid of your emotions to avoid simple stories and the need for control that sometimes create unhelpful emotional responses.

Connect to compassion for yourself and others.

Remember that each of the mindtraps will catch you: they are part of our human greatness as well as our human failings. The more we appreciate ourselves and one another in our fullness, the better able we will be to climb out of the mindtraps quickly and easily.

reflexes and into a bigger version of ourselves. There’s no way to escape the traps entirely; they have been too useful for too long. But we can build the ladder with our daily practices to help us scamper out of the traps as soon as we begin to tumble in. As we engage in these practices, we find the next versions of ourselves, increasing our compassion for our human frailties while gaining in human wisdom. (See Table 2 for a summary.) Mark said goodbye to the last of his team members and came back into the living room, where Leroy and Alison were polishing off the last of a fine New Zealand pinot noir while their sons slept on the couch around them. The girls

BU I L D I N G A L A D D E R TO E S C A P E T H E M I N D T R A P S

131

were playing some game in the basement that resulted in the occasional outburst of giggling. “So what do you think, Leroy,” Alison asked quietly. “We’ve been talking about the ladder tonight and about staying out of the mindtraps, but I still think we’re missing something somehow. What do you think is the most important thing for us to remember about these mindtraps, anyway?” Leroy, unusually serious, stared out into the middle distance for a few minutes, sipping his wine and pondering the question. “I think the most important thing is that we remember that we are bigger than we seem. In a more predictable world, only the very powerful really had a chance to have great influence; the vast majority of people simply lived and worked and died without leaving many fingerprints behind—other than the children who eventually became our ancestors. But now that things are so interconnected and move so fast, each of us can have an influence on the world that’s so much bigger than just our family.” “Haven’t people always had an impact that was bigger than their families?” Mark asked curiously. “Yes, of course, sorry,” Leroy said. “But truly massive impact was reserved for those with the most power. As you’re seeing in a small way at AN&M, Alison, small shifts in some people can lead to pretty dramatic outcomes.” “That’s true,” Alison agreed. “I can’t believe how well it’s going, to be honest. I’ve found that some of the smallest experiments are the most powerful—like the one where we put bowls of fruit in the common kitchens with signs that

132

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

said, ‘Please eat me here and not at your desk.’ People have taken to standing around, eating fruit and the other snacks that have appeared alongside the fruit bowls, and those ­common kitchens have become social gathering places in a strange new way. I’d never have imagined that would happen.” “And that’s the thing, right?” Leroy said, his eyes sparkling now. “We focus on complexity and uncertainty when it brings us bad things—a sudden market downturn, a surprise layoff, a shocking illness. But actually, complexity and uncertainty bring us delights we couldn’t have predicted, as well as horrors. Just as these mindtraps can keep us feeling small and protective, escaping them liberates us to do extraordinary things: listen deeply, empower others, create the conditions for more wonder and creativity. I have no idea how this next chapter of our human story will turn out, and I’m afraid about that sometimes. But I’m also so hopeful, because I know that just as a small number of people can create a disaster, so too can a small number of people create a new movement for bringing beautiful things into the world.” “I agree,” Alison added. “I think these practices have not just made me more successful, but also made me more kind, more compassionate, more empathic. I think they make me a better leader and a better mom to my kids. And I’m happier.” “Ah, if it only came in a pill,” Mark muttered. “You’ve been wanting this in a pill from the very first moments I told you about the mindtraps!” Leroy said, raising a pillow threateningly.

BU I L D I N G A L A D D E R TO E S C A P E T H E M I N D T R A P S

133

“I was just kidding!” Mark said, cowering in fake fear. “I would have taken it in pill form then, but it turns out that I can change—and my work gets even better.” “Not to mention your marriage,” Alison reminded him. “Not to mention my marriage,” Mark repeated obediently. Just then, the two girls, tired of their game downstairs, raced into the living room singing “Baby Beluga” at the top of their lungs. The boys were startled awake and into tears. Tate sat up so quickly that Mark ended up spilling red wine all over both of them, which made Tate cry even more—and then made Naomi cry, because she was tired and ready to be in bed. Various children were scooped into various grownup arms and comforted; towels and sparkling water were brought to soak up the wine and lift the stains; and tutus were changed for jeans and sneakers. Mark helped Leroy to his car, carrying his daughter as Leroy buckled his sleeping son into his car seat. “Hey, Leroy,” Mark said, once both kids were safely buckled in, heads drooping heavily. “I really am grateful for all of this— the help at work, the friendship at home. I think we’re making a difference together.” “That’s the point of it all, isn’t it?” Leroy asked. “When we finally figured out that your purpose was to lighten the heaviness of people’s lives and make them a little happier, it all made sense to me—and I think you’re living into that every day.” “Next stop, meditation!” Mark said, smiling. “Right after I empty my inbox. Only 18,643 messages to get through until I read your mindfulness instructions.”

134

U N LO C K I N G L E A D E R S H I P M I N D T R A P S

Leroy rolled his eyes and got in his car. “You know, Mark, people can change,” he said, “but sometimes they don’t.” Mark was still laughing as the car drove off.

F I N D I N G O U R W AY T H R O U G H

There is no way we will ever escape all of the mindtraps that complexity sets for us; the world is moving so much faster than our poor evolutionary systems can manage. We will always be dealing with the massive ambiguity and uncertainty in our lives with some difficulty. And perhaps that’s the point. Humans have long thrived on facing the impossible in order to push beyond it: to create fire, to craft cathedrals, to erect skyscrapers, to cure polio. What has changed lately is the size of the stakes. As Johnathan Foley, former director of the California Academy of Sciences, says, “For nearly all of human history, the planet was big and people were small.” The stakes through most of human history have been to support and protect a family, a village, a nation. “Now,” Dr. Foley tells us, “We humans are big and our planet is suddenly small and fragile.”8 For the first time, we are faced with the challenge of protecting and sustaining all life on the planet. This challenge means we need to find ways to avoid the traps that have become more common—and more dangerous. Whether we are building a business or raising a family, we are constantly faced with a world more

BU I L D I N G A L A D D E R TO E S C A P E T H E M I N D T R A P S

135

complex than our inner wiring can easily handle. Our writing of simple stories, our sense that we are right, our desire to get along with others in our group (and rail against those not in our group), our wish for control, and our constant quest to protect and defend our egos will always be a part of us. These traits have been a part of our greatness, but without work to escape their difficulties, they will be a part of our downfall. Our biology sends us signals to simplify, to protect, to circle the wagons and keep ourselves safe. These reflexes are natural and helpful in a simple world of frightening foes and obvious dangers. But our world is now too interconnected, too complex, too uncertain to rely on these ancient drives. We stand at a moment in history when we are being called on to refuse those hardwired traps, to understand and tolerate complexity, to question our reflexes, and to love our humanity. We now need to choose a future that reaches beyond fear and into connection, beyond the safety of the simple and into the bounties and difficulties of complexity. Our ability to grow beyond our reflexes is likely to shape what happens next to us as a species as we reject simplistic reactions and find our bigger selves so that we can solve some of the most complex challenges humanity has ever faced.

This page intentionally left blank

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1.  I am in the camp that thinks cilantro (or coriander leaves) tastes like soap—so please don’t add that ingredient to the soup when I come for dinner. But I happen to love the case that weaves through the book.

CHAPTER 1: THE FIVE QUIRKS AND HOW THEY BECOME TRAPS

1.  K. Shultz, On Being Wrong: Adventures at the Margin of Error (New York: HarperCollins, 2010). 2.  R. Kegan and L. Lahey, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2016).

CHAPTER 2: TRAPPED BY SIMPLE STORIES

1.  Y. N. Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: HarperCollins, 2015).

137

138

N OT E S

2.  By the way, the flag-loving man is Keith Johnston, my dear friend and the coauthor of Simple Habits for Complex Times. He is a quirky fellow who defies simple stories, and his high school principal fell into the mindtrap early. I am deeply grateful that the principal was unable to drag Keith into the trap too (though we know that many of us are unhelpfully influenced by the simple stories parents and early educators have about us). 3.  Here’s a comparison between Fukushima and Onagawa: www-bcf.usc.edu/~meshkati/Onagawa%20NPS-%20Final%20 03-10-13.pdf. And here’s a comparison between the two Fukushimas: https://hbr.org/2014/07/how-the-other-fukushima -plant-survived. 4.  http://thebaffler.com/salvos/time-bandits-perlstein. He goes on to say, beautifully: The longing to assimilate the strange to the familiar is only human; who am I to hold myself aloof from it? But it’s just not a good way to study history, which when done right invites readers to tack between finding the familiar in the strange and the strange in the familiar. History roils. Its waves are cumulative, one rolling into another, amplifying their thunder. Or they become attenuated via energies pushing in orthogonal or opposite directions. Or they swirl into directionless eddies, with the ocean’s surface appearance as often as not obscuring grander currents just below. 5.  D. Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011), http://science.time.com/2013/11/19/ remember-that-no-you-dont-study-shows-false-memories -afflict-us-all/. 6. Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow. 7. Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow.

N OT E S

139

8.  P. Coleman, The Five Percent Solution: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts (New York: Public Affairs, 2011).

CHAPTER 3: TRAPPED BY RIGHTNESS

1.  R. A. Burton, On Being Certain (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008). 2.  Thanks to Pulitzer Prize-winning Kathryn Shultz for this question (from her TED talk) and for her fantastic book On Being Wrong. 3. Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow. 4. Shultz, On Being Wrong.

CHAPTER 4: TRAPPED BY AGREEMENT

1.  And in what I think is the most unexpected finding from neuroscience yet, Lieberman found that if you take a Tylenol before being exposed to social pain, you feel less social pain! Don’t try this at home, though, because painkillers each have some diabolical effect on our stomach or livers. So it’s not a helpful form of self-medicating, but it’s really interesting all the same. M. Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (New York: Crown, 2013). 2.  This mindtrap isn’t just alive in organizations with healthy family cultures, though. Even in organizations with toxic cultures, nearly all of the interactions I see are polite and well mannered in public, even if they slam one another in hallway sessions afterward. 3.  D. Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups (New York: Bantam, 2018). 4.  Y. Li Lu, C. Yuan, and P. Lauretta McLeod, “Twenty-Five Years of Hidden Profiles in Group Decision Making: A Meta-analysis,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 16, no. 1 (2012): 54–75.

140

N OT E S

5. Lieberman, Social. 6. Coleman, Five Percent Solution. 7.  R. P. Vallone, L. Ross, and M. R. Lepper, “The Hostile Media Phenomenon: Biased Perception and Perceptions of Media Bias in Coverage of the Beirut Massacre,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 49, no. 3 (September 1985): 577–85. 8.  Catherine Fitzgerald is a pioneer in the field of executive coaching, with two books on leadership and coaching. This is one of the most helpful questions she has shared with me. Given that she’s also my mother, you could say that this was also her most helpful piece of maternal advice.

CHAPTER 5: TRAPPED BY CONTROL

1.  For more on this, see Bandura’s wide body of work. You could start with A. Bandura, “Social Cognitive Theory: An Agentic Approach,” Annual Review of Psychology 52 (2001): 1–26. 2.  Bandura, “Social Cognitive Theory,” 1. 3.  This perverse outcome of targets in complex settings is very well studied. For a dip into the literature, you can check out A. Meekings, S. Briault, and A. Neely, “How to Avoid the Problems of Target-Setting,” Measuring Business Excellence 15, no. 3 (2011): 86–98,  http://bit.ly/yeci8d; J. Seddon, Systems Thinking in the Public Sector: The Failure of the Reform Regime ... and a Manifesto for a Better Way (Triarchy Press, 2008); and S. Shorrock and T. Licu, “HindSight 17,” Eurocontrol, July 2013. 4.  This mindtrap shapes our political sphere too. Brexit was about regaining control that globalization more than the European Union had taken from the United Kingdom. I was once on an airplane sitting next to someone who was wanting to throw the governor of California out on his ear. What was so bad about Jerry Brown, I asked? “If he were any good,” my seatmate said, “why does California still have so many wild-

N OT E S

141

fires?” Here is the ultimate in blaming an individual when life is frighteningly out of control. 5. Coleman, Five Percent Solution.

CHAPTER 6: TRAPPED BY EGO

1.  Thanks to Brene Brown for daring to get us in touch with our need for vulnerability. B. Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead (New York: Penguin Group, 2012). 2.  J. Quoidbach, D. Gilbert, and T. Wilson, “The End of History Illusion,” Science 229 (2013): 96–98. 3.  J. Holmes, Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing (New York: Crown Books, 2015), 224. 4.  Kegan and Lahey, Everyone Culture, 1. 5.  J. G. Berger, Changing on the Job: Developing Leaders for a Complex World (Stanford, CA: Stanford Business Books, 2012); Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); D. Fisher, D. Rooke, and W. Torbert, Personal and Organisational Transformations: Through Action Inquiry (Edge\Work Press, 2003). 6.  For a really interesting take on this idea, see H. Ibarra, “The Authenticity Paradox,” Harvard Business Review, 2015, https://hbr.org/2015/01/the-authenticity-paradox. 7.  I describe this process in much greater detail in Changing on the Job.

CHAPTER 7: BUILDING A LADDER TO ESCAPE THE MINDTRAPS

1.  J. G. Berger and K. Johnston, Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014).

142

N OT E S

2.  Here a thank-you to those leaders in the room that day— particularly Kirsten Dunlop and Mark Reinke—who knew about the cancer diagnosis, who offered to step in to take my place, and who supported me from the side when I wanted to do it myself. I learned much that day how the energetic support of others could make my road a little easier. 3.  Patrick Hill, www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/ having-a-sense-of-purpose-in-life-may-add-years-to-your-life .html. 4.  The research on money is clear, and the results are probably unexpected (unless you’ve read them). Money is vital to our happiness in order to get us out of subsistence levels, as you might expect. But once we are middle class and have enough money for food and shelter and the basics, there is basically no happiness prize in the ever-larger sums of money so many of us pursue. 5.  T. Kashdan, L. Feldman Barrett, and P. McKnight, “Unpacking Emotion Differentiation: Transforming Unpleasant Experience by Perceiving Distinctions in Negativity,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 24, no. 1 (2015): 10–16. 6.  My very favorite book on this subject is by the MacArthur Genius Grant winner Robert M. Sapolsky, who is also on my “desert island” list: Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping, 3rd ed. (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2004). 7.  K. D. Neff and O. Davidson, “Self-Compassion: Embracing Suffering with Kindness,” in Mindfulness in Positive Psychology, ed. I. Ivtzan and T. Lomas, 37–50 (Routledge, 2016). 8.  Personal communication.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bandura, A. 2001. “Social Cognitive Theory: An Agentic Approach.” Annual Review of Psychology 52: 1–26. Berger, J. G. 2012. Changing on the Job: Developing Leaders for a Complex World. Stanford, CA: Stanford Business Books. Berger, J. G., and K. Johnston. 2014. Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Brown, B. 2012. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. New York: Penguin Group. Burton, R. A. 2008. On Being Certain. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Coleman, P. 2011. The Five Percent Solution: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts. New York: Public Affairs. Coyle, D. 2018. The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups. New York: Bantam Books. 143

144

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fisher, D., D. Rooke, and W. Torbert. 2003. Personal and Organisational Transformations: Through Action Inquiry. Edge\Work Press. Harari, Y. N. 2015. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York: HarperCollins. Holmes, J. 2015. Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing. New York: Crown Books. Ibarra, H. 2015. “The Authenticity Paradox.” Harvard Business Review. Kahneman, D. 2011. Thinking Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Kashdan, T., L. Feldman Barrett, and P. McKnight. 2015. “Unpacking Emotion Differentiation: Transforming Unpleasant Experience by Perceiving Distinctions in Negativity.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 24, no. 1: 10–16. Kegan, R. 1994. In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kegan, R., and L. Lahey. 2016. An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Li Lu, Y., C. Yuan, and P. Lauretta McLeod. 2012. “Twenty-Five Years of Hidden Profiles in Group Decision Making: A Meta-analysis.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 16, no. 1: 54–75. Lieberman, M. 2013. Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect. New York: Crown Books.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

145

Neff, K. D., and O. Davidson. 2016. “Self-Compassion: Embracing Suffering with Kindness.” In Mindfulness in Positive Psychology, ed. I. Ivtzan and T. Lomas, 37–50. Routledge. Quoidbach, J., D. Gilbert, and T. Wilson. 2013. “The End of History Illusion.” Science 229: 96–98. Sapolsky, R. M. 2004. Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping, 3rd. ed. New York: Holt Paperbacks. Shultz, K. 2010. On Being Wrong: Adventures at the Margin of Error. New York: HarperCollins. Vallone, R. P., L. Ross, and M. R. Lepper. 1985. “The Hostile Media Phenomenon: Biased Perception and Perceptions of Media Bias in Coverage of the Beirut Massacre.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 49, no. 3: 577–85.

This page intentionally left blank

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jennifer Garvey Berger believes that leadership is one of the most vital renewable resources in the world. At a time when organizations are often forging the path rather than following the path of others, leadership is about creating the conditions for people to be their most creative, connected, intelligent selves. Jennifer is a founding partner and CEO of Cultivating Leadership, a consultancy that serves executives and executive teams in the private, nonprofit, and government sectors around the world. She designs and teaches leadership programs, coaches senior teams, and supports new ways of thinking about strategy and people with clients facing these dramatic shifts in complexity, volatility, and change in their workplaces and markets. She blends deep theoretical knowledge with a driving quest for practical ways to make leaders’ lives better. Jennifer holds a doctorate in adult development from Harvard University. She was an Associate Professor at George Mason University before she left the academy on a mission to connect powerful research and the people doing real work in the world. She is the author of Changing on the Job: Developing Leaders for a Complex World and coauthor with Keith Johnston of Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders, both from Stanford University Press.